The Widow (24 page)

Good that she has sense enough to ask for help; she needs it. And she's a valuable person. I'd hate to see her in trouble. I'll do what I can for her. But I've a lot of work. Not like that pissy baccalaureat. An entry class for a higher school; the competition's tough, you know: you're up against the Family Favourites from Louis le Grand and Henri Quatre; the Parisian Orchids.

Arlette thought him a valuable person too. Better able to defend himself than poor old Marie-Line. He knew where he was going.

She made a couple of false casts. The School of Decorative Arts was in the Krutenau, no distance: pleasant building with a nice garden. She got no help from a tiresome secretarial female who thought that students were a pest and shouldn't be allowed. And there were too many Michels, and all sounding or proving wrong. But there was a Michel – if you follow – whose surname was Michel. Jean-Luc Michel. No longer a student. Finished school. An artist now. Lives over in the Petite-France, one of those old houses.

It is the most picturesque part of Strasbourg. The engineer Vauban dammed the river here and sent it different ways, to make a moat around the fortified town: downstream of his
beautiful bridge is a weir and a millstream and backwaters, and crooked streets through the seventeenth-century huddle, and the city fathers are busy restoring a nostalgic atmosphere with cobblestones and antique gas lamps, and rather pathetic corners of greenery. The most tumbledown of the old blocks have been razed in favour of exceedingly expensive flats in suitably steep-roofed dove-cote style, but where they are pressed thickest and darkest, and dingiest, there you find the poor who live in highly insanitary and crowded fashion. The streets are blind, greasy old masonry alternating with heavily barred windows choked with a century of dust. The very word ‘alsatia' seems to have been invented to describe these houses.

A door yielded to her push. Stone flags, remnants of ragged plaster, loud smells of Portuguese cooking and loud voices in what didn't sound like Portuguese. Might be Yugoslav, and so might the cooking. A stone stair mounted. But she'd got it right: a big plywood notice painted in bright blue said J-L. Michel, with an arrow and various mermaids, pointing upwards. Repeated on a smaller scale on the next landing. At the second was a door in the same violent ultramarine, and ‘Michel' in script. A card said ‘Come on in; faites comme chez vous', so she did.

Immense surprise. Instead of the darkness, the dirt, and the plaster chewed down to humid old stonework it was bright, white, beautiful. The walls had been fresh-plastered and whitewashed, the old wooden beams carefully stripped and restored. This was all attractive. Art, mostly looking bad but anyhow vigorous, stood and hung about in quantities; that was to be expected, but the floors had fresh planking and several largish green trees stood about in pots. As Arlette knew from only that morning, such things cost lots of money. A doorway was open to a kitchen. Also all modern. Tiles, two gleaming new fridges, a cooker grander than her own. Lots of bottles, bundles of herbs. Not that much money in art; fellow must have come into an inheritance. No owner of all this to be seen: she repressed the temptation to pinch a bottle
of champagne and a few shallots in a plait and do a bunk with them.

‘Monsieur Michel,' she bawled.

‘In here,' a robust baritone bawled back. She pushed a very nice original oak door, and surprise heightened. Two rooms or maybe even three had been knocked into a narrow but splendid studio facing on the inner courtyard. The old windows replaced, in good taste, by much bigger ones. On a big table with two anglepoise working lamps the artist was doing things with acid to a copper sheet. The press for pulling prints stood against the far wall. The artist was tall and burly, with a bushy beard, a blue-jean suit, sandals, and a superduper-emperorlength cigarette.

‘This is the grander for being so unexpected,' looking jealously at a lemon tree four times the size of the one Mr Taglang had given her.

He beamed with approval. Splendid-looking, and the looks suited the Bohemian get-up: the thick dark brown hair waved and curled naturally above well over six foot of muscular body, bright intelligent eyes and a good forehead. At first glance most impressive; almost the young Augustus John. At second glance a bit too pleased with himself.

‘Yes, if I could do something about that damn entrance one could have a gallery here. But we have a permanent exhibition, me and a few chaps. And that's better than gallery space, and the bastard taking twenty or more of every per cent you earn. What can I do for you?' with an air of being ready for anything.

Arlette grinned.

‘Not really in the market today, but could be another time.'

‘Just window-shopping huh? Make yourself at home. The loose prints in the sheaf are really cheap, only three to seven hundred apiece. The walls three to five thousand, bar one or two of the biggies. A drink if you want it? White wine or a kir?'

‘No thanks; I'll wander though.'

‘Sure. I can't leave this, I'm afraid; got to time it carefully.'

The prints were commercial stuff; competent streetscapes on nice broad lines. Nothing to write home to Mother about, but look nice on the living-room wall of German tourist bourgeoisie, and that was what they were designed for. The Alsace wine towns, and the hill landscapes of the country round them. With the smells of the acid came an incensey smell of expensive male stuff to dab under the ear. The hands were too white. He was only twenty-two or three, but had already the practised patter. Another one who knew where he was going, and seemed well on the way with no time lost.

‘See one of my posters?' he enquired.

‘A girl I know mentioned you. Marie-Line Siegel.'

‘Ah, yes. Doctor Siegel's friends don't buy many pictures, I'm sorry to say. I know the girl, of course. In fact she's a tiny bit amorous,' with a little laugh.

‘Yes I know.'

‘Really – how? She told you, I suppose. Well, don't take it too seriously. Not exactly a grand passion. She's not a minor, but I wouldn't want her father stamping about making a scene. She's a bit of a scene-maker herself.'

‘Oh, I'm not an emissary; I just know her and like her, that's all. She worries me a bit. Drinks too much.'

‘Ach,' casually, ‘nothing very dreadful.'

‘No, but a bit irresponsible. She has no mother and she's rather vulnerable.'

Variety of facial expressions; virtuous, affronted, irritable: the no-earthly-business-of-mine and the even-if-it-were-I-wouldn't-want-to-know.

‘I detest people who preach.'

‘The invariable excuse of the selfish and superficial.'

‘Why don't you ask whether I sleep with her.'

‘A satisfaction to your vanity, no doubt.'

‘She's of age to make up her own mind. You people who moralize make me sick.'

‘It must be true since it says so in Playboy Have you been giving her drugs too?' He was silent for a moment, dabbing at the work in front of him with a rag, bending down and
squinting at it, making a to-do of the concentration involved.

‘Got to make sure it's all neutralized,' chatty and relaxed. ‘Has she been telling you these tales?' wiping his hands and throwing the rag in a corner. ‘Totally untrue you know. I wouldn't mind, and it wouldn't have any importance, but that sort of malicious invention can make trouble. One wouldn't want to spread stories like that, and if I were you I'd advise her not to repeat them. Her word's not that trustworthy. What people do is no concern of mine, but if you start imagining orgies here, smoking grass and group sex and rubbish like that, it's total folklore. People always tell these tales about a studio. I've my living to make and it's important to me and believe me, I don't mix business with pleasure. I know plenty of these girls who hang around the art school but I tell you quite frankly they don't interest me. I don't want to say anything about Marie-Line. She's a nice girl. But it excites them to haunt studios, and it excites them to make up lurid tales. Better believe me – nothing in them. I've smoked marijuana occasionally, who hasn't, but I don't use drugs and don't have any here. Okay?'

‘Perfectly okay. You're building it up rather, aren't you? I came to say that if you care about her, don't encourage her in anything silly. A bit of thought and you'll see this is right; nothing to do with morality. Having said that, nice to have met you, and good luck with the business.'

‘Sure. No hard feelings. Sorry, just that people here imagine God knows what, all this haunt-of-vice stuff, don't stop to think a painter has something better to do – I suppose I'm sensitive. Come again – bring your friends!'

Arlette, whose car was parked miles away, walked into the town and stopped to phone Arthur.

Arthur was mollified at her not getting home, delighted to have lunch bought him instead, and only produced an interminable argument about poisonous tourist restaurants in the town. It must be very lavish indeed; Chinese food – all right, agreed on that but it would take him some time because of the bicycle. Arlette, with time to kill, ambled up the Rue des Hallebardes, supposedly reserved for the stroller on foot but still full of delivery vans.

The old town of Argentoratum, squeezed in the loop of the 111, became Strasbourg and was cut off on the other side by the fortified moat of the False Rampart. It has been split by broad modern roads, creating naturally a howling desert: the Place Kléber, desiccated concrete lid of an underground car-park, has no character left at all. Still, around the cathedral, while the Students, the Jews, or the Goldsmiths would not recognize the narrow medieval streets named for them, the proportions have not altered much. Little heaps of gaudily painted metal on rubber wheels replace the domestic dungheap, but the way is still obstructed, upsetting the city Fathers. The municipality hereabouts has made coy beginnings at a pedestrian sector. If it can steel its timid heart to make this universal as far as the waterside, where it speaks vaguely of planting greenery, the old town can be nursed back to life. Painfully, and expensively. But given devotion … much like the children Arlette had had to re-educate, after falling off their motorbikes. The end of the autumn was doing its best; a radiant warm day, perfect temperature for pottering. There were lots of German tourists having a shopping spree with blissful heavy marks at prices pushed up to compensate. You can buy some pretty things in the tourist district round the Rue des Hallebardes. You'd almost think you were in the Bahnhofstrasse in Zürich. On a
day like this, with no smelly wet coats or umbrellas, Bay Street in Nassau after a cruise ship gets in.

Her eye was caught by something she'd seen that very morning. A car of extravagant Italian elegance, racing red, a little dusty from country roads. Mr Taglang's good customer. Retail outlet hereabouts – to be sure, the flower-shop on the corner. Tourists are not going to buy cut flowers much; an awkward parcel to carry around or leave in a hot car. But they're often taken with that cute little pineapple-palm, or growing your own coffee on a windowsill in Wiesbaden. She stopped by the window, and watched a stout mum having a mauve orchid pinned to her bosom, with much merry laughter, by a smiling girl in a pretty apple-green overall. Business was being done. Arlette looked at agreeable Carven clothes next door, without bothering about the price tags. Lunch was quite expensive enough as it was. Didn't even bother with a rose for Arthur's buttonhole: he'd be wearing that horrible corduroy jacket. She hurried on up to the Rue des Etudiants, or she'd be late. In fact he was already tucking into the white wine. Inclining, tiresomely, to be frivolous and gibber on about butterfly stew: she put a stop to this.

‘I asked you out because I'm serious, and this is serious, or so I'm growing steadily convinced. I need your judgment, and advice.' Arthur looked serious, and listened carefully, and rubbed his hair, and ate through an enormous meal, and sent the boy for more tea, without getting his wits too clouded.

‘Hm, this is getting altogether too much like eccentric English professors, detecting away while playing those games, Unreadable Books and Impossible Heroines: I'm getting perilously close to cliché in my behaviour and this is too close. Take it to the police.'

‘Who'd be pardonably sarcastic about detectives. There's no evidence at all. Just try and make it add up.'

‘Well, one might say that the likeliest form of felony for a chap like Demazis would be white-collar crime, fiddling the paperwork. Jumps to the eye in a business like that, there's lots of invoicing, export licences, juggle-juggle from one country
to another. Typically Dutch; they buy carnations in Nice and flog them to the English, much to the fury of the French. Sounds piffling, but plainly there's a lot more money in flowers than you or I think.'

‘Must be stronger than that. And what's the connection with this art boy?'

‘How do you know there's any connection at all? Just because he has some potted plants in his living-room; doesn't mean a thing.'

‘Look, he said to me, did you see one of my posters, and I thought posters he'd designed. There are these small ones for exhibitions, and of course they go round persuading shopkeepers to stick them in the window. Scotchtaped to the door of that flowershop, a print of the Rue de la Bain aux Plantes or whatever, one looks at these things idly without taking them in. I was at the door here almost before I remembered it.'

‘Pretty loose connection. As you say, they ask shops to tack up notices for painters' shows.'

‘But if you're a graphic artist, isn't there some technique in falsifying documents you might be good at?'

‘Now I'm with you. Like washing cheques. Not laundering the funds, but literally, effacing the print with acid or something to fox the computer.'