Froger went on looking at the sketch and muttered, as if he were reciting a poem, “If you disturb me again while I’m working, James, you’ll need some plaster yourself — for the arm I will break. It’s up to you, you little bastard.”
“You’ve got strong hands, but that doesn’t mean you scare me, Jaak. You can play with your plaster titties as much as you like, but if I see you lay a finger on that girl again, the next project you work on will be your own tombstone.”
He barely looked up. I brushed past him as if he were one of his own white monsters. A row of them glared at me as I left the room, and I expected a cold plastery hand to grip my shoulder at any moment. They were truly awful creatures, disgusting, reflections of a twisted soul. Their faces had dripped and run in long white streaks that trailed down their cheeks like the frozen tears of the damned.
On my way out, I told Helga to holler anytime she needed me...
She’d needed me a day earlier. Before the cops had called me in to assist in the search for her, she’d hired me herself. Her name was Helga, she studied art history with a concentration in classicism. Jaak Froger had found her phone number posted on a “Models Available” bulletin board at the art school, and now he was concentrating on her curves.
The first time she’d posed for me with those piercing green eyes was when I’d run into her in a hallway at the house. It was like an eighteenth-century rendezvous in a country manor, where the ticking of a grandfather clock was louder than the whispered conversation of a pair of secret lovers. But Helga wasn’t exactly walking around in a hoop skirt and petticoats. She was stark naked when she turned a corner and bumped into me, and she was visibly upset. I gently pushed her off me. Dried, gritty plaster was smeared all over her like salve on an arson victim’s bums.
“You better hustle off to the bathroom and wash that stuff off you,” I said, “before one of us gets hard.”
She giggled. “Who are you?”
“I’m the butler who’s going to have to clean up this mess.”
“Forget the mess. I need you to protect me.”
“From what? A plaster avalanche?”
“They’re all crazy here.”
“You’re one to talk,” I said. “You need to get some clothes on before somebody nails you... to a pedestal.”
I shrugged off my black morning coat and draped it over her shoulders. Her red hair was white with plaster, and flakes of it drifted down onto the collar like a hobo’s dandruff. She stood there looking around her like a madwoman out of a Virginia Woolf novel. I touched a match to a joint and handed it to her as a peacefulness offering.
“That’s pot,” she exclaimed. “You’re a strange sort of butler.”
“I get paid just like a ‘normal’ butler,” I said. “I throw in strange for free.”
“I’ll pay you extra if you’ll protect me,” she whispered. “This place is a madhouse.”
“Why don’t we pretend you’re not naked and you tell me what the trouble is?”
At that moment, I heard footsteps approaching on the thick carpet. Jaak Froger ran towards us in his dirty smock, as if he’d been called to the O.R. for an emergency appendectomy. But from Helga’s expression it was obvious that he’d already been operating. Or at least trying to. She backed away from him nervously. Froger had a look in his eyes as if God had sent him a text message telling him he was on the right path to salvation. But I suspected that his wild expression had a more earthly cause. He held a nasty-looking metal file in his hand.
“So, here you are, Helga. I’ve been looking all over for you. You said you were just going for a cigarette.”
“She was in the mood for something a little more potent,” I said, exhaling pot smoke in his face.
“Who the hell are you? This is a private home.”
“I’m a private kind of guy. So that’s all fine, then.”
Helga wrapped her arms around my waist and held me close. Froger was salivating like a cop who’s spotted an expired parking meter. He stormed up to me and raised the file.
“I don’t know how you got in here, buster, but I know exactly how you’re going to leave.”
I buttoned my coat across Helga’s ample chest. Outside, it had begun to rain, but the heat was on in the house and I really didn’t need the coat, anyway. We were all so cozy together, I was ready to ring the bell for tea. Then I remembered that, since I was supposed to be the butler, fetching the kettle would actually be my job.
“What happened?” I asked Helga again.
“He wanted to cover me with plaster. My whole body”
“I hired you as a model,” Froger snapped. “This project is bigger than you are, girl. You’re not going to go all prudish on me now, are you?”
“I thought you were supposed to be a sculptor,” I said, “not a standup comic.”
“And who are you again, my man?”
“I’m James, the new butler,” I said. “And what are you? A sculptor or a fetishist?”
“I’m in a difficult stage at the moment. A transitional stage.”
“What stage is that, exactly? Puberty?”
“My earliest works were cast aluminum,” he explained, as if either of us really gave a damn, “and then I tried working in carved marble. But now I’m searching for something more naturalistic. Plaster allows me to replicate the human form almost exactly. So—”
“—so you figured you could dunk her in a vat of it?”
“I’m making a life cast, James. I — ach, why am I explaining myself to a fool like you? My wife will call the police to have you removed, and then you and I can get back to work, little one.”
He gazed intently at Helga. Not in a decadent or dirty way, but strangely, insistently, as if she belonged to him and he could do whatever he liked with her. And then, abruptly distracted, he wandered over to the living-room door and stood there scratching his head with the business end of his file.
Helga, meanwhile, was stuck to my side like Super Glue.
“Your wife’s already made a phone call this morning, Jaak,” I said.
He glanced up, surprised.
“She called me. I’m your new butler, and I’m supposed to make sure you don’t sweep too much dirt under the carpets. You artists think you’re perfectionists, but I’ll see your perfection and raise you.”
He blinked absently. “Excuse me?” he said.
“You heard me. I don’t care what ‘stage’ you’re in, Oedipal or narcissistic or whatever. You better play well with others, because the butler’s here, watching every move you make.”
He waved the file dismissively and stalked into the living room. The door swung shut behind him, and, behind it, an argument erupted. Helga gazed up at me playfully, as if inviting me to make a sandcastle from the plaster that still clung to her breasts.
“I want to hire you to protect me from his crazy moods,” she said.
“Make me an offer. You’re the third person who’s wanted to hire me this week.”
“I need the money he’s paying me, James. If you help me, though, I’ll split it with you.”
So in addition to private detective and butler, I was now also a model’s bodyguard...
Before the cops and Helga, yet another prospective employer had promised to treat me like a servant but pay me a king’s ransom. One day earlier, I’d waltzed through this same living-room door to meet the distinguished gentlewoman who sat in a wooden rocking chair by the window.
She was a study in contrasts: white hair, black sunglasses, pale skin, jet-black high heels. We all have our signature accessories. Mine is my battered Ford Taurus, hers was the expensive pair of sunglasses perched on her fine nose despite the drizzly weather and the room’s subdued lighting. She’d introduced herself over the telephone as Francine Marie-Christine d’Oplinter Cruz, and I felt like it was the first day of school and I was about to be tested to see if I could remember all that.