Starry Nights (20 page)

Bonheur is here in the cellar, and he's waving a sheet of paper. He's smiling, but businesslike. He hands me what looks
like the kind of stationery you'd use for an invitation to a fancy tea party.

Julien—I'm working at La Belle Vie today. Fastest way to get there is to take the third door on the right. —T

I look at Bonheur.

“T?”

He nods. “T.”

“For Thalia, I assume.”

“Yes.”

I rub a palm across my face. “This is a note? From the head of the Muses?”

Another nod, this one longer.

“Like we're in high school and she's telling me where to meet her when classes end?”

“She gave it to me, and I'm giving it to you,” he says, his voice clipped with urgency.

“She gave it to you?”

“Yes, Julien, yes. She has crazy red hair and she smells like pomegranates.”

“And she's working at La Belle Vie?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” he repeats, spreading his arms in frustration.

“The head of the Muses is writing you notes.” I can't help but feel that I'm losing it again.

“And you're in love with a girl who's trapped in a painting. So there.”

Sophie huffs. “Guys! You're both being idiots. There's art exploding at the Louvre.” Sophie sticks her chin out at me and points downward. “Go.”

I'm in too deep to stop believing. “I'm guessing we get there through this door in the floor thing?” I point to the rectangular outline, edged by silver Muse dust.

“I've never been down there, Julien,” Bonheur says in a soft voice. “This is as far as Sophie and I can go.”

I'm alone in this. I have to rely on the person I've never put much faith in. Me. But it's always been just me. Now, it
has
to be just me; there's no other way.

“See?” Sophie demonstrates, pressing her hands against the stone slab edged by silver dust. Nothing happens to the slab. “It's a one-way door for us. When they need it, they open it. We talk in here, in our basement. Otherwise, we just leave each other letters,” she says, tipping her forehead to the side of the slab with the mail slot for Muses.

Bonheur follows suit, showing me as well that his hands can't open the slab.

A brief gust of anger rips through me, but I don't even know who I'm mad at. I'm ticked at the Muses for never telling Bonheur and his family the whole truth about the painting, I'm angry at Renoir for trapping Clio, and I'm enraged at myself for not knowing how to save the sick art. “I swear, if I get stuck underground in Paris for the rest of my days, I will come back as a badass ghost and haunt you both forever.”

Bonheur laughs and holds up his hands. “Duly noted, and I will consider myself now fully prepared for your ghostly vengeance.”

I kneel outside the line of sparkling shimmery dust. I place my palms on the stone slab, and it's a chemical reaction at my touch, baking soda and vinegar making a volcanic concoction. The slab slides open, like a door at a department store. I half expect to tumble into a magical underground world, where the sky is endlessly blue and the hills are sunlit green. But I have no such luck. Instead, I'm in the catacombs.

I don't understand why anyone gets a kick out of subterranean trips through the intestines of Paris and its dank, musty tunnels far below the streets. This city is a layer cake, with houses built on top of cellars, built on top of tombs, and you never know where the bowels will take you. I never know because I've never gone into the catacombs.

It's creepy dark down here, an infernal burrow that pinches my lungs with its airlessness. I don't move for a moment, as I try to orient myself and let my eyes adjust. The third door on the right, the note said. I look up at the slab above me and turn right, but it's so black I can barely see in this narrow, twisty cave. Then I remember—I've got a light on me, thanks to modern technology. I reach for my phone from my back pocket and swipe the screen. Simon's friend Corinne at the archives was wrong—it would have made a big difference if Jean Valjean had had a smart-phone when he was down in the sewers. My phone guides the way, and I find the door quickly, turning an old rusty handle that opens to a set of stairs. The steps take me up to another door and into the backroom of La Belle Vie, a famous perfume shop on the rue de Rivoli not far from the bridge with all the padlocks. This is a layer of Paris I never expected to unearth.

I walk into the shop.

La Belle Vie sells only flacons, not the scents themselves. The bottles are beautiful things—the sort of gift you'd buy your mom and she'd be thrilled to spritz a little something on her wrist from the old-fashioned bottles complete with puffy atomizers. The bottles are all hand painted, some with delicate purple flowers, others with flowing red vines. They are things no one ever needs. Beauty without reason. It's the perfect location for a Muse to do her work.

The sign on the front of the shop has been turned around, letting customers know the store is closed. The curtains are drawn. A woman is bent over the counter, with sheets of flaming red hair surrounding her. She wears laboratory goggles, holds a miniature pair of tweezers in one hand, and stares hard at the pages full of musical staffs and notes spread on the counter in front of her. She flicks the tiniest bit of silver dust from her fingertips to the paper. Then, like a surgeon, she lowers the tweezers with pinpoint precision over a line of complicated-looking orchestrations.

I wait, not wanting to disturb her project. She seems to grab something from the paper, but when she peers closely at the tweezers, she sighs at them with disdain, then drops them on the counter.

“Hi there,” I say carefully.

She jumps, then shakes her head. “I'm so sorry. I was trying to get these lost notes.”

“Excuse me?”

She stands and offers a hand. She wears a thin silver bracelet on each wrist, just like Clio. “I'm Thalia.” She has high cheekbones
and soft skin that does indeed smell like pomegranates, but her hazel eyes look tired. “The Roques, who own this shop, are music lovers. They found a lost symphony from Mahler, but some of the notes are missing. I was trying to see if I could coax them out.”

“Okay,” I say, as if that's the sort of thing I hear every day. “And the Roques are like Bonheur and Sophie, I take it? More emissaries?”

“Yes, they let me work in here when I need to. That's why I had you meet me here, since I knew I'd be working on this symphony for a while,” she says, and Clio was right—it is all work as a Muse. I'm being squeezed into Thalia's schedule as she multi-tasks. “That's part of my job. I handle a lot of the problems and complications with art, literature, and music.”

“Like an ombudswoman in a department store? Someone who looks into complaints?”

“Kind of, yes. I do some inspiration work myself, but lately my tasks are centered more on the things that go wrong.”

“Do these catacombs go everywhere? Like around the world? So you can handle whatever … goes wrong?”

“They do. Well, you can only open these doors if you're a Muse—human or Eternal. But yes, that's what gives us access to wherever we're called on to work. We don't get to spend much time together down there.” She points.

“In the catacombs?”

She laughs. “No, far below. Where we actually live in a gorgeous house in a lovely field. It's beautiful and peaceful. But we're
working most of the time, so we're rarely home. Which is why we're glad to have some help from humans, and you're the first.”

“Well, I actually need
your
help. Because we have a serious problem with the art. Just a little Géricault flooding, and a Titian breaking, and an Ingres being strangled with cushions. I think it all started with the Renoirs and spread from there. But the Renoirs are the least of it now. They're only fading and the rest of the art—well, it's pretty much having a massive meltdown. I have no idea what's going on, so I hope to God you do and can help me stop it.”

She purses her lips and looks away. I watch her closely. Her eyes are stony, but there is something a bit like guilt in the way her jaw is set and then in how she exhales. Heavily, with shame.

Oh.

Oh my.

I know what happened.

I stumble, stepping back, as a wave of understanding clobbers me. I grab the edge of a shelf full of green etched bottles with antique gold caps to steady myself. I didn't want to be right about this, because it feels so wrong.

“You did this, didn't you?” I say, my voice so low it can barely register the shock. “You cursed the Renoirs.”

She swallows tightly, then turns back to me. Her eyes are wet but hard. “I love Clio. I love all my Muses. They are all I know, and when he took her from me,” she says and a deep breath seems to expand through her chest and into her shoulders, a breath of righteousness, as her words turn into the serrated edge of a knife, “I was furious.”

She walks close to me, her steps controlled and crisp. “I tried to free her myself. When Suzanne switched out the paintings and brought the real one to me with Clio in it, I did everything I possibly could to free her. I used dust on it to try to reverse what he did. I tried every tool in my tool kit to bring her out. I took her canvas with me to museums around the world. To London, to Florence, to the Louvre. I hid inside the museums until night fell and tried to free her then with the magic of a museum. But Muse dust is powerful, and he'd cursed her until a human muse came around. It was binding, and there was nothing I could do. I was helpless and I was livid.” As she recounts the story her eyes fill with fury, with the kind of anger that must have engulfed her then. “I did the thing I never thought in a million years a Muse would do. I hurt art. I cursed beauty.”

The confirmation of what I'd thought to be possible all along. That the Renoir damage was never from the sun. That it was a curse, the most powerful kind a painting could ever have on it—a curse from the ultimate lover of art. I can picture Thalia trying to free Clio but coming up empty, a wail of rage echoing through her. I was disgusted moments ago, but I understand why she did it. I might have even done the same. “You really loved Clio,” I say.

“Of course I did. Of course I do. My Muses are the only ones I've ever loved. And I went, quite simply, ballistic. I cursed every last painting of his but hers.”

My heart floods with relief at the last part. “What was the curse, though, and why is it happening now? Why not kill off his art back then?”

Thalia's shoulders drop. She bites her bottom lip, then looks at me. Her eyes are tired. Being an Eternal Muse seems exhausting. “When he took what I loved, I wanted to hurt him. So I cursed his art to fade away … starting when a human muse appeared. It seemed the fitting punishment given what their disagreement was over.”

But I can barely hear what she's saying because there's a ringing in my ears, and a slowing of blood in my veins. My vision blurs and everything in me stalls. “So it's because of me that his art is fading?”

“No, Julien,” she says quickly. “No. Absolutely not.”

“But it is, in a way. You could have killed his art then to punish him. Instead, his art is dying because I'm around, and now all the other art is completely freaking out.” I grip the counter as I recall with pinpoint clarity the moment I noticed the first bit of damage on the piano girls—a few days after art came alive for me. A few days after I came into my own as a human muse.

“I was punishing him for not believing,” Thalia says, but there's a defensiveness in her voice.

“If he believed in human muses, he'd be after me, Thalia. And he's not. All along, he's been trying to stop Clio. He's been trying to prevent her painting from being hung. He's always been after her,” I say, and a cold dread stretches through me. Maybe he is still hunting her, not just pigment. Could he have been casing the museum the other day to figure out how to cut her canvas from the frame, roll her up, and walk off with her in his sweatshirt sleeve, then closet her away forever? It's not implausible. I can
count off dozens of museums that have been victims of unsolved theft, from the Rembrandt heist at the Gardner in Boston to the robbery of several works by Matisse and Picasso at the modern art museum here in Paris. The art has never been recovered because that's the thing about art theft—masterpieces are nearly impossible to sell, but they're incredibly easy to hide. Forever. “Look, all I care about is Clio, and the art. We need—”

She cuts me off. “How is Clio? I need to know.”

“She's great,” I say quickly, wanting to get to the pressing matter.

“When is she coming back? Are you going to bring her back? Are you going to let her out of the museum?”

“Um, yeah. Soon,” I say, but the truth is it's up to Clio, not me.

“What has she been doing?”

“We've been hanging out.”

“Hanging out? What is that?”

I laugh, because Thalia doesn't seem like a woman who blows off work. She wouldn't really know what hanging out is. “We talk and we row boats and I draw things for her, and we eat dessert, and it's the best time I've ever had in my life.”

“You love her,” Thalia says, but it's hardly a statement. It's more like an expression of wonder.

“Yes.”

“And she is in love with you?”

“Yes,” I say and I can't help myself from grinning as I think of her, and last night, and the words we both said.

“What is it like? That kind of love?” Thalia asks, as if it's the first time the subject of this kind of love has ever come up.

I start to speak, to tell her what it's like—it's like you can do anything, it's like the stars exist for you, it's like you can stop time and fill it with the way your whole heart and mind clicks perfectly with another person.

That it's like the impossible has become possible.