The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (13 page)

Yevgeny’s converted farmhouse was perched atop the first of several low ridges that rose above the village of Siorac, its terrace facing south and his studio at the other side of the building for the subtle light from the north. There was little land attached to the house and no vegetable garden, only some scattered stone urns with straggling geraniums and a lawn that needed mowing. Built of the local stone, the house itself was of modest size, square shaped with two stories; traditionally it would have had four rooms to each floor. To the west stood a large old barn that had been used to dry tobacco, now transformed into a white-walled art gallery with some partitions providing extra hanging space for Yevgeny’s paintings.

Most of them were not to Bruno’s taste, images that sprawled over the borders between fantasy landscapes and science fiction. They reminded him of old album covers from the seventies. In some of Yevgeny’s unearthly scenes with unfamiliar vegetation, blue and green women with vastly elongated bodies, enormous eyes and swollen, hairless heads struck artistic poses. Despite the distortions their faces were evidently painted to be beautiful. Bruno could feel Pamela struggling to make polite comments as she strolled through the gallery, Yevgeny attentive at her side. Bruno’s eyes widened as he glanced at the catalog and saw that the prices ranged from four to nine thousand euros.

He turned a corner around a partition and came across a series of street scenes in winter that he assumed were Russian from the fur hats and the Cyrillic letters above the shops. Burly women used sharpened iron bars to break up the ice on the pavements. Others plodded uphill weighed down by children and large string bags. Three men in an alley were sharing a bottle of vodka while a policeman in big felt boots and a gray coat looked the other way. Bruno found them charming, simple and conveying an atmosphere of human life defying the drabness of the city with its grimy snow and iron-dark sky. They were priced at a thousand to twelve hundred, still well beyond Bruno’s budget.

“I like these,” he said, and Pamela echoed his thought. “Much more to my taste,” she said, leaning forward a little and putting on her reading glasses to examine them more closely. “Wonderful expressions you have given to the children’s faces. They seem very real.”

Earlier that day Yevgeny had called Bruno at the
mairie
and said he’d be at home that evening and would Bruno like to bring a friend for an aperitif and to look at his paintings. He’d called Pamela, a little tentatively, since he was less and less sure of their relationship. She had hesitated at first, and he thought she was about to decline. But then she said if it were just for drinks and they could ride the horses first, she’d heard of Yevgeny’s work and would like to see it. They’d arrived late, Pamela taking longer than usual to get ready after riding. She had emerged looking particularly appealing in a simple black dress belted with a green scarf that set off the color in her eyes and the bronze of her hair. Bruno loved her hair, thick and glossy and always seeming to glow with health. He wondered if she’d dressed up for him or for Yevgeny, before telling himself not to be so foolish; women dressed to delight themselves, or perhaps to impress other women. He’d never been sure which.

Yevgeny led them across the courtyard and into his studio, where some canvases with conventional Périgord landscapes leaned against the walls. On one easel was a large head-and-shoulders portrait of a dark-haired young woman draped only in a colorfully striped blanket. The background looked unfinished, the end of a bed and a small table just sketched in. The woman’s expression was solemn, but her skin was flushed and her eyes seemed to dance with mischief. One arm was raised, smoothing back her hair, the other hand clutched the blanket around herself, and somehow the artist had made it clear that this was for warmth rather than modesty.

“That’s very good indeed,” said Pamela. “Is she from around here?”

“No,” said Yevgeny, looking pleased and a little abashed at the same time.

“She’s Laroshka, a girl I knew in Moscow, a wonderful muse of mine. I painted it from memory, a loving memory. It was a long time ago, Brezhnyevshina in the seventies, the time of Brezhnev in the Kremlin. Her name is Lara, but I called her little Laroshka. She wanted to be an actress, but life got in the way. Lara is a grandmother now, very plump with gray hair and thick spectacles, but I always think of her like this.”

On the other easel was an unfinished painting of the aged Patriarch, entranced as he looked up into the sky where three fast fighter jets were approaching. His face was almost complete, the flowing white hair only half done. The warplanes were no more than sketched lines, somehow conveying an inhuman speed and contrasting sharply with the elderly man who watched them with such hungry eyes.

“I’ve been working on this since his birthday party,” said Yevgeny. “I was watching him when the jets came, the memories he had and the excitement he still felt. It says something about old age, that the inner passions never die. I’ve tried to give him the eyes of a young man, but they aren’t coming yet as I want them to be. It’s difficult.”

He led them into a passage that seemed to run the length of the house to a staircase. The walls were lined with portraits of various members of the Patriarch’s family. Bruno stopped to admire the individual paintings of Raquelle and Victor, Marc, Chantal and the Patriarch, but the only images of Madeleine that he saw were in paintings of several members of the family together.

Yevgeny’s sitting room was small but comfortable, two sofas at either side of the large chimney where a woodstove with its glass doors open stood ready to be lit. On the wall opposite the French windows that led to the terrace was a large portrait of the Red Countess wearing an enormous wide-brimmed hat and holding a black walking cane. She looked hauntingly slim and impossibly elegant, like some
Vogue
model from the fifties.

“Wine, vodka, champagne?” asked Yevgeny, hovering by the door that led to his kitchen. They chose champagne, and he handed Bruno a bottle of Gosset, asking him to open it while he brought the glasses. He came back within moments carrying a tray on which stood three champagne glasses of a kind Bruno hadn’t seen in years, wide rimmed and low. Yevgeny passed out small plates and forks and then pointed to the remaining plates loaded with hunks of dark bread and smoked fish, a bowl of cream and pickled mushrooms, slices of ham and cornichons. A bottle of vodka, so cold that the glass had become dimmed with ice, stood on the tray.

“Zakuski,” he said. “Russian snacks. We never drink in Russia without eating a little something.” He pointed to a small bowl where a silver teaspoon rested on what Bruno thought might be black-currant jam. But Yevgeny said, “And a little caviar, not Russian, I’m afraid, but from our own River Vézère. Have you been to that place near Les Eyzies where they make it? I think it’s very good.”

“If a Russian thinks so, I must try it,” said Pamela, and began praising the portraits they had seen and saying how different they were from the otherworldly landscapes in his gallery.

“That is what Russian customers like to buy,” Yevgeny said with a shrug. “When I have an exhibition in Moscow, I double the prices so that the buyers can bargain me down. Russians love to think they are getting the better of a deal.” He finished his champagne and refilled the glass with vodka.

“They are more than I can afford, but I’m glad to have seen them,” said Bruno, shaking his head in refusal when Yevgeny offered him the vodka bottle. “How long does a painting take to do?”

“The new-world landscapes for the Russians take two or three days, and the Moscow street scenes you liked about the same. The portraits take longer, but I enjoy them more. My father’s portrait will take as long as I need to get the eyes right. The portrait of Laroshka could take forever. I have been working on her for more than a year, but she keeps turning into someone else, another woman who lives in my head.” He laughed and then solemnly raised his glass to them. “Here’s to the tricks that memory plays on us.”

“That’s a wonderful painting of the Red Countess,” said Bruno, looking at the canvas on the wall. He wondered how an artist so talented could make himself churn out the fanciful paintings they had first seen. “Has she ever seen it?” He put his hand over his glass when Yevgeny tried to pour him more champagne, but Pamela accepted a second drink.

“Not that one, but one very like it, which she first saw in Moscow. My father has it now in the château, in his bedroom, and I painted this one just for me. It’s how I remember first seeing her, when she gave me wonderful chocolates from Paris. I think it was when my father had just fallen in love with her. My mother hated her, naturally, refused ever to go to her films, although they were very popular. She was the one who called her Parizhanka, the ‘woman from Paris.’ You can make it sound like a curse in Russian, or you can make it sound like a love song; ours is a very flexible language.”

He raised his glass again. “Here’s to the memory of Gilbert, who was a good Russian in his soul. He spoke our language so beautifully and loved us so much that he almost became one of us, just like the Patriarch.”

“Do you miss Russia?” Pamela asked, while Bruno was struck by how important Gilbert still seemed to this family, and how crucial the country had been to Gilbert’s life. Bruno had a hunch that he’d have liked the man.

“Do I miss it? The Russia of today, not much,” Yevgeny said, and shook his head fiercely. “The Russia of my memories, of my imagination, yes, I miss it deeply, so in a sense I’m in exile here, just as Gilbert was when he came back here from Moscow. He left his soul there. But in my head I can always go back, at least some of the way. Perhaps that is why I paint so many scenes of imaginary worlds.”

“Did you see much of Gilbert here in the Périgord?” Bruno asked.

“Yes, there were some nights we drank vodka together, recited Blok and Akhmatova and sang Vysotsky songs. You should have heard Gilbert sing his ‘Wolf Hunt,’ it could have been Volodya’s gravel voice. I could have been back in Volodya’s apartment on Malaya Gruzinskaya.”

“Was Vysotsky the one that married the French actress?” Bruno asked. The other names meant nothing to him.

Yevgeny nodded. “A great actor, a great poet, a great Russian, and Vysotsky inspired the only Kremlin story I know with a happy ending. All the party bosses like Suslov hated Vysotsky and wanted to ban him from writing and singing and send him to the Gulag. But Brezhnev was the leader, and he loved his songs about soldiers. Brezhnev was ill at his dacha one day when the phone rang. It was his daughter Galina, who’d heard that Suslov had ordered Vysotsky to be arrested while Brezhnev was out of action. She had Vysotsky in her apartment, and she got him to sing down the phone line to her father, and the old man made sure Vysotsky stayed free.”

Yevgeny paused and raised his champagne glass, newly refilled with vodka. “I told that story to Gilbert in this very room, and he said he’d forgive Brezhnev a lot for that.” Yevgeny wiped his hand over his face. “We had very Russian evenings but made the mistake of not eating enough as we drank. We missed the old Moscow so much that both of us would pass out on these sofas.”

“Is there anyone now who can share such evenings with you? Your father?” Bruno asked.

“It’s never the same, drinking with your father,” said Yevgeny and poured himself another vodka. “It’s like kissing your sister; your heart isn’t in it.”

“Well, thank you so much for letting us see your paintings and for the drink, but we mustn’t impose on your hospitality,” Pamela said, rising to her feet. Bruno, who had noticed before the way Pamela always used politeness whenever she felt embarrassed, followed suit. “If I might use your bathroom before we go?” she asked.

“Down the corridor, opposite the door to my studio.”

“Me, too,” said Bruno.

“There’s another one, upstairs at the end of the passage.”

Having climbed the stairs, Bruno found three doors that could fit Yevgeny’s vague description. He took the one on the right and found himself in Yevgeny’s bedroom, as large as the living room below. A giant bed was flanked by two windows giving views over the ridges to the south. Facing the bed on the longest wall hung a lavishly framed life-size painting of a young blond woman lying nude on a single bed. An icon of the Virgin and Child stared down at the naked woman from the wall above her. The nipples were the red of young strawberries, and a carefully placed hand did not quite cover her pubic triangle, just a little darker than the hair tumbling loosely from her head. On a small bedside table was a glass encased in a silver stand with a handle, containing what might have been tea.

It was only then that Bruno recognized this woman as the young Madeleine. Well, well, he thought. The only portrait of her Yevgeny seemed to have done was kept in the privacy of this room. Somehow he assumed the painting had been set in a Moscow bedroom, if not painted there. Perhaps Yevgeny had an unusually accomplished imagination, or perhaps Madeleine had posed as his model. But there was something intimate in her gaze that made Bruno think, with more than a touch of envy, that the artist was this woman’s lover.

Bruno took a last, admiring look at her and retreated, closing the bedroom door quietly and then finding the bathroom. While peeing, he could not help but grin at the small self-portrait of Yevgeny that winked wickedly at him from above the loo. The shower curtain was clear plastic overlaid with a giant transparency, a photo of Moscow’s Red Square taken as the guard was being changed at Lenin’s Tomb, and behind the soldiers the colorful riot of spires that was St. Basil’s Cathedral. Back downstairs, he found Pamela already at the door, thanking Yevgeny and poised to leave.

“Could you drop me in Trémolat?” Pamela asked when they were driving down the hill to the main road that ran alongside the river.

“How will you get back from there?” he asked.

“Somebody will give me a lift,” she said casually, then swiftly spoke again, deliberately changing the subject. “I was struck by what he had to say about Gilbert. Perhaps I should say I noticed what he didn’t say about him. I had the impression Yevgeny was trying to drop you a hint, as if wanting to reveal something but not sure whether or how to do it. Are you still making your subtle inquiries into Gilbert’s death?”