Moments later a door opened down the hallway and Francine came out, in jeans and a green pullover. She slipped into the kitchen, dragged a chair from the table, and sat down quietly beside Brokmeyer.
“What about the museum?”
Brokmeyer shrugged.
Taylor turned to Francine. “C’est après-midi—Picasso à la musée?”
“D’accord.” Her eyes brightened the slightest bit, the green of a stained-glass window. “J’aime bien Picasso.”
“What does she say?”
“She likes Picasso. What about you?”
“Not a hassle,” Brokmeyer said and put his arm around Francine.
* * *
At the museum Brokmeyer looked bored. Despite the gray Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t crowded. The gallery floor gleamed beneath the ceiling lights, a checkerboard of highly polished black and white squares.
Several hundred Picasso sketches hung along the walls, each but a few quick strokes of pencil or charcoal—Taylor counted only nine strokes to a sketch of a matador—yet they realized an entire world.
He loved the banderilleros most of all. Poised on their toes, they were almost ballet dancers, arms high above the horns of the bull, ready to stick their ribboned darts into its shoulder muscles.
Francine liked the picadors, serious gaunt men on armored horses, goading the bulls with long pikes. Sketch after sketch her light green eyes fixed wide. “Très simple,” she said. “Très elegant.”
Brokmeyer stayed at her side. “Maybe one day,” he said grinning, “Picasso will draw a football player.”
Taylor shook his head. “He’s dead.”
“Qu’est-ce qu’il a dit,” Francine asked.
Taylor shook his head again. “Rien.”
At the end of the first row of sketches, he found what he’d been hoping for—two stick-figure soldiers of fortune riding on horseback from a broken windmill. “Don Quixote!” he exclaimed. “Le grand chevalier!”
Brokmeyer stuck his hands in his pockets. “Wery nice.”
“Mais il était fou!” Francine said. She stepped back, tilting her head.
“What did she say?”
“Quixote was crazy. He thought the windmill was a dragon.”
Taking Francine by the shoulders, Brokmeyer backed her onto a black tile square, trying to make a joke about a chess game. “You are the queen,” he said. “Taylor is a pawn.”
As he moved to fix Taylor to a different square, Francine strayed from her mark. She didn’t understand. “Les Picassos,” she said quietly. “Je veux les voir.”
“Not a hassle.” Brokmeyer looked down the long line of sketches. “I am going for a drink of water. Does Francine want a drink of water?”
Taylor put his hands on his hips. “De l’eau?”
“Non.”
“She says no.”
Brokmeyer hesitated, then went off by himself.
* * *
In the morning Brokmeyer took Francine with him to fill the cigarette machines. Taylor carried his laundry to the washer in the basement and, while his clothes churned in
the suds, set up a card table in the garden for a late picnic lunch.
In the kitchen he found a pot of boiled potatoes and some bratwurst that Brokmeyer had defrosted overnight. He put them on a tray, added bread, apples, and a ball of cheese, and took it down to the back yard.
When Francine and Brokmeyer returned, he saw that Francine had been crying. Brokmeyer sent her upstairs for the chess set. “We must play again,” he told Taylor, “to decide the champion of Bielefeld.”
“What’s wrong with Francine?”
“Her mother.” Brokmeyer pulled two bottles of wine and a bottle of scotch from a brown paper bag and set them on the table.
“I thought she forgot about that?”
“Not a hassle. Wery good job with our lunch.” Opening his lawn chair beside the table, Brokmeyer sat down and helped himself to a piece of bread.
“Be back in a minute,” Taylor said.
“Where do you go?”
“To throw my clothes in the dryer.” Taylor hurried from the garden.
As he entered the building, Francine passed him with the checkerboard and the little velvet-lined box of chessmen. Avoiding his eyes, she scuttled out back.
He went to the basement and fiddled with his laundry. When he returned, Francine jumped from his chair to sit in the grass beside Brokmeyer, so quickly there was no time to refuse the seat. “Très bien, le repas,” she said.
“Merci. Glad you like it.” He added the English before Brokmeyer could ask for a translation.
Sinking into the lawn chair, he chugged a glass of wine. He hadn’t eaten since
after the museum—he’d been waiting for the others to return from the cigarette machines—and as he sliced himself some bread and bratwurst, the wine pushed into his head.
Lunch was hurried. Francine ate very little. Rolling up her jeans, she unbuttoned her blouse and tied it in a knot beneath her breasts. Shading her eyes with one arm, she stretched out in the grass to take the sun.
Brokmeyer set up the chessboard, arranging the pieces mechanically. He poured himself some scotch, tore off another piece of bread, and without consulting as to black or white and the privilege of the first move, pushed out a pawn from his side of the board.