Green Fairy (Dangerous Spirits) (13 page)

It is harder to conceal the pile of one-franc notes from the other dancers than it was to conceal Jean’s twenty. They seem to multiply; every time he thinks he’s pulled them all from his garter, more fall to the floor. The ermine is once again monopolizing the attention of the others with her twenty-three, over small cups of coffee. But Cireil, of all the dancers, sits near Niki and sees the paper doves flutter like snow to the ground, light against the fox’s black paws.

“He likes you, eh?” the wolf smiles.

“He appreciates me.” His behind is sore, but it is no worse than he has known at other times, and not so bad he cannot sit.

Cireil nods. “One night already, and more on the way, yes?”

“I really don’t know.” Niki has gotten most of the bills into his purse, and the smell of such concentrated money is strong, musky, and not altogether pleasant. The bills are certainly not cleaned every night. Even so, he will exchange them with M. Oller later. Henri is close to finishing the portrait, and Niki is anxious to see him. He has enough money from Jean’s twenty left over that he can afford to wait.

“It is not so bad.” Cireil puts a paw on Niki’s wrist. He flinches; it is also sore, from the ropes. Cireil notices but does not understand. “Do not scorn the man who will lift you from the gutter, even should he place you behind glass.”

“Behind glass?” The ermine turns, laughing. “The only glass we will be behind is the store windows, looking longingly in. Where is our little cu-cu going to shop?”

“Nowhere.” Niki hurries to close his purse, but it is too late.

The ermine’s tone sharpens to a needle point. “What is all that? Where did you get that?”

“I danced for it.”

Cireil breaks in. “He has a patron, who takes him to a private box.”

Before Niki can stop her, the ermine has snatched his purse and opened it. “
Sacré Dieu!
” One-franc notes drift to the floor. “Twenty-five? More?”

“Twenty-six,” Niki says.

The ermine drops the purse to the ground. The other dancers stare with green tinging their eyes. “You are not worth twenty-six,” the ermine says.

“And where is a rich patron going to find another boy so pretty as our Niki?” Cireil demands.

“Any street down by the Pont-Neuf.” The ermine stares down. “It is not right for these deviants to have so much money.”

Niki feels increasingly uncomfortable, singled out. He can spare three francs; Jean will give him more on their next night, if he asks. So he takes three bills and holds them up for the ermine.

“I do not need your charity.” The ermine sniffs.

“It is for all you have done to help me.”

Cireil is shaking her head. But the ermine reaches down and takes the bills in the hand that is not holding her café au lait. “It is nice to have one’s work recognized,” she says loftily. She turns away, gathers the other dancers about her, and soon they are engaged in a loudly merry conversation.

“She will be expecting it from now on,” Cireil says softly. “You now tithe to her and M. Oller both.”

“I will not be here much longer.” Niki folds the rest of the notes into his purse. He looks at the ermine and wishes for a moment that he could overturn her coffee all over her soft white fur, to stain it brown.

Cireil reaches out and touches Niki’s muzzle. “We have all thought that at one time or another.”

“He says he loves me,” Niki whispers, and even though he is trying to be hopeful, he cannot keep the rest of the truth from tumbling over his tongue. “But only with his words.”

Cireil is a good friend. “That is better than not saying it at all,” she whispers back.

She does not ask if he believes it.

Henri does not ask it either, when Niki returns home with a warm loaf of bread from the bakery down the street, fresh from the ovens. Dawn is still no more than an idea on the horizon, but Henri is awake, sketching in the silver moonlight. His painting is taking shape, a dark cloud of leaves overshadowing a female mouse reclining, her arm up to shield herself from the leaves. He describes the leaves with quick stabs of charcoal, but for the mouse he uses touches so delicate that Niki marvels that they leave traces on the canvas at all.

Niki leaves the bread on the bed next to Henri. The black rat appears to take no notice of it, so absorbed is he in his painting. “It’s beautiful,” Niki says, eating the bread he took for himself. The warm crust gives a satisfying crunch between his teeth; the warmer interior is soft and delicious.

“Bah. The Dutchman could paint something twice as beautiful in half the time.”

“Could have,” Niki points out. “No longer.”

“Death comes for us all.” The rat says it as easily as he might comment upon the weather.

Niki sighs. “One need not be reminded of it so often.”

“
Chéri
,” Henri says, “I am only trying to make you feel at home.”

Niki stretches his mouth into a smile, back along his slender muzzle. “Then you should beat me and tell me I will never be of significance in the world.”

“You will not be,” the rat says. “There is no need for beating.”

“I can be of significance to one person, can I not?”

The rat’s tongue shows between his pink lips, against his black fur, as he traces a difficult line. “If you are speaking of me,” he says, but does not finish.

Niki does not want him to. “Jean has paid M. Oller for my company yet again.”

“Ah, yes. Your ‘patron.’ How was it, that first night alone? Did he hold you tender? Did he whisper promises of love into your ear? Did he slide into you so gently—”

“Stop.” Niki bites his lip where it is already bleeding. “Yes. All of that.”

“Liar.”

“So what if I am?” Niki cries. “Perhaps he means it. Perhaps love means something different to him. He is not of our world, he is not free as we are to imagine love. He knows only what his people have told him.”

“And what have his people told him?” Henri sets the small brush down and picks up another. “That love is measured in sex-stained one-franc notes? Where did he put them this time?”

Niki feels the heat of the chamois’s fingers inside his underthings, below his tail and around his sheath, the one-franc notes left there as flags marking claimed territory. “Just in my garter,” he says.

Henri spares him a contemptuous look. “He is not of our world; he is only
in
our world. You are not of his world, Nikolai. If you attempt to enter it, it will spit you back to the gutter and your lovely tail will be soiled with Bella’s rotten vegetables.”

“I can live between worlds.” Niki empties his purse onto the bed: a small pile of one-franc and fifty-centime coins, with some smaller change from the purchase of the bread, mixed with the one-franc notes from the cabaret. “I am not of this world either, but I exist here.”

Absorbed in his canvas, Henri does not look at the small pile of money. “I shan’t touch that,” he says. “And you are of our world,
renardeau
. Our world is not merely this small ghetto on the hill. Our world is in every dark shadow where a child chooses art over money, in every lonely garret where the writer starves until his novel is done, in every discarded tube of paint scavenged and rescued so that its dregs may yet serve.”

“Perhaps you should paint poems rather than pictures.” Niki begins to remove his clothing.

“This chamois is nothing but a diversion,
chéri
.” Henri’s whiskers twitch, registering the movement. “As long as you view him as no more than a way to pass the time, you risk nothing. Do not dream of freedom. He is a painted door. There is nothing beyond.”

Dawn brightens the room, almost enough light for Henri to switch to paints. Niki removes his trousers, drops them to the floor. His underthings follow. “And this painting you are working on,” he says, “is there freedom beyond that? Or is that no more than a way to pass the time?”

Henri stops. He stares at his painting and then puts his charcoal down. Gently, he lifts the painting from the easel and sets it on the floor. He turns his stool and easel to face the bed, and picks up the painting Niki has not yet seen.

Niki sits and arranges his tail. Henri leans forward and adjusts it, then corrects the fox’s posture. “I will paint your ears today,” he says. “Remove the ribbons for me.”

Slowly, Niki reaches up. His fingers brush the black velvet of each ribbon, and the small loops of thread that keep them in place. He pulls them free. In his mind’s eye, he sees the ragged, misshapen edges of his ears revealed. They droop to the sides of his head as they always do when he pictures their scars; he pulls them upright.

“Beautiful,” Henri says, and he says it with more than just words. Niki winds one ribbon around a paw, lets the other fall to the bed. Outside, dawn’s presence glows pink through the filthy window frame.

The alarm jolted Sol from sleep like a slap across the muzzle. He squirmed, lying on his stomach, then blinked at the clock. He’d forgotten to turn the alarm off.

“Fuck,” he murmured into the pillow, and then pressed his hips into the mattress. Swearing, grinding into the sheets, it all felt grownup and adult, like the hard rock on his iPod. He reached up to turn it off.

Something soft trailed along his paw, brushed the alarm as his thumb hit the off button. He blinked, focusing on it.

A black velvet ribbon was wrapped around his paw.

With a yell, Sol scrambled out of bed. His foot tangled in the covers; he lost his balance and fell to the floor with a thump he barely felt. The ribbon was there, it was really there, and how the hell had that happened? He didn’t own a velvet ribbon. His heart was racing. He unwound the ribbon and found the threads that would loop it over an ear.

Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God. He couldn’t look away from the soft blackness that seemed to swallow up all the early dawn light in the room. It was impossible and yet there it was, and he remembered every detail of the dream, the feel of Niki reaching up to slide the ribbons free, the ragged edge of his ears, the gentle winding of one ribbon around his paws.

Sol reached up tentatively and drew a finger across the edges of his ears. They were whole, smooth, unblemished. But the ribbon remained.

“Sol?” His mother’s voice, followed by a knocking. “Are you okay, honey?”

He was lying naked with his shoulders on the floor, one foot still wound in his sheets, and despite the terror of the ribbon, he was still not in a condition he would want his mother to see. “Fine, fine, just a minute!” he yelled, twisting and pulling his foot from the stubborn grip of twisted linens.

“What are you doing up so early?”

His foot came free. He heard the click of the door handle. “Just a minute!” He ran to his dirty clothes, grabbed his boxers, and jammed his legs into them, pulling them up to his waist. “I just…I wanted to get up to, uh. Shower. And do homework.”

“Can I come in?”

“Yes.” He jumped back to the bed, sitting on the edge of it as though he’d just gotten out of it, also thereby concealing the still-too-prominent bulge in his boxers. He set his paws on his knees, and right before the door opened, he noticed that the ribbon was not in them any longer.

His mother came into the room and said something about his father while he was staring at the floor, the clothes, everywhere, searching for the ribbon. After a moment of silence, Sol realized she was waiting for him to say something.

“Sure,” he said. The ribbon wasn’t anywhere on the floor between his bed and the clothes pile. He must have dropped it on the clothes pile when he picked up the boxers. He didn’t wear a lot of black clothing on account of his black fur, but he did have a couple black t-shirts. They were the only black he saw in the pile. Terror and his mother had made him presentable enough to get up. “Um, I’ll be down in a second.”

“So you were going to shower after that?”

“Yeah.” He tried not to be obvious about staring at his dirty clothes. He still couldn’t see where the ribbon might have gone.

His mother smiled. “Well, get your baseball clothes on. I’ll have breakfast on when you get back.”

“Right.” He barely heard what she said, anxiously waiting for the door to close. When it did, he dove into the pile of clothes and scattered it all over the floor. He picked up every scrap of black cloth twice, and none of them were velvet.