Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 138, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 821 & 822, September/October 2011

Stinking Plaster by Bavo Dhooge

Translated from the Flemish by Josh Pachter

In the decade since the publication of his first novel, Ghent’s Bavo Dhooge has produced more than sixty books. In 2002, he won the Dutch C rime Writers Association’s Shadow Prize for the best first novel published in Dutch or Flemish. A three-time nominee for the Flemish Crime Writers Association’s Diamond Bullet Award for best novel, he won in 2009 for Stiletto Libretto, which was also nominated for DCWA’s Golden Noose Award.

I tasted blood, sweet blood, but that was just an appetizer. A second later, a pair of hands gripped my head and gave my hair a quick rinse in a tub of plaster. The stink permeated my nose and mouth and lungs and weighed on my tongue like a charred steak. I struggled free of the tub and felt wet plaster bite at my eyes. There wasn’t a mirror handy, but five’ll get you ten I looked as sexy in gray as Richard Gere. The trick would be to get the stuff off me before it hardened and turned my perfect profile into a Greek bust with a busted nose.

But there wasn’t time for a self-beautification project. My attacker was still on the loose, somewhere in the atelier. Every light bulb in the place had been shattered, one by one, and the studio was as dark as a tomb.

I scooped up a plaster limb from a pile of debris. It could have been an arm or a leg — hell, for all I knew, it might just as well have been a giant toe. Contemporary art goes right over my head. Whatever it was, it’d do as a club in a pinch, and it might just help me avoid ending up stiff and cold as a statue myself.

It was almost pitch black, but just enough light leaked in around the edges of the drawn drapes to allow me to pick my way. The plaster figures that surrounded me were like angels guarding a crypt. I hoped they’d look out for me, too, while they were at it.

Then my attacker stumbled into a statue and cursed loudly, and I ducked behind a plaster gargoyle the size of a basketball.

“Hey, watch your language!” I yelled.

No response. I reached the work table where I remembered having noticed a flashlight the day before. A lot had happened in the last twenty-four hours...

The previous morning, I was admitted to a stately home in Millionaires’ Row, the wealthiest neighborhood in Ghent. My old nemesis, Inspector Bonte, who’d invited me, hadn’t been happy about it. He and his minions were there to investigate the disappearance of a girl.

“Somers,” he said, as I entered the atelier, “this is Jaak Froger.”

He nodded towards a lanky figure with long gray hair and a beard. Froger didn’t seem to recognize me in my detective outfit, but that’s the story of my life: Nobody pays any attention to private dicks — or butlers, either.

“My pleasure,” I said, sticking out a hand. “I’m Pat Somers: ‘I stay awake so you can sleep.’ ”

“That’s his advertising slogan,” Bonte explained. “He makes more sense in person.”

Froger ignored my hand, and I put it back where it belonged. “I take it you didn’t ask me here to critique my business card, Bonte?”

“Hardly. Mr. Froger is an artist. A sculptor.”

“You’ll have to find me a toga. I don’t pose in the nude.”

“You’re always posing,” Bonte growled.

“Jealous of my Greek profile?”

“Somers, I wouldn’t be jealous of you if you owned your own island in the Caribbean.”

“We haven’t seen each other in a while,” I told the sculptor confidentially. “We need to catch up.”

He looked like some ancient sage or philosopher, lost in a world of Higher Ideals. He stood there with one hand resting lightly on a wooden work table, its surface littered with knives and spatulas and other tools of his trade — and, oddly, the black barrel of a flashlight.

“You ever want to carve up the inspector here, I’d be happy to help. I’ll bring sandwiches, we can make a day of it.”

“All right, Somers, enough chitchat. The girl we’re looking for modeled for Mr. Froger. Her mother hasn’t heard from her in three days, and she didn’t show up here for her session yesterday.”

Froger awakened from his pensive moment and rejoined us in the land of the living. He uncrossed his arms and dug his hands into the pockets of his white smock. He looked like a tramp who’d dressed up as a surgeon but had forgotten to wash his hands.

“Maybe she didn’t like the finished product,” I suggested.

“It isn’t finished,” said Froger, like a politician discussing a bill that was still in committee. He had a Dutch accent.

“Maybe all that posing gave her cramps.”

“For five hundred euro, she can damn well deal with cramps,” said Froger. “I’ve already paid her, and I’m not finished with her yet.”

“So your interest is in finding your muse, is that it? You don’t really much care about the girl herself?”

“She’ll be worth far more as a statue than she’s worth as a girl,” he said, his words as cryptic as Sanskrit.

I glanced at Bonte. “I’d love to go right on chatting with Lord Froger, here,” I said, striking a match against the rough surface of a plaster grotesque, “but it’s like trying to get straight answers out of a block of marble.”

Bonte took my arm and led me outside. Through a dusty window, I watched the Dutch Rodin’s face go blank, as if he were a table lamp and someone had just pulled the plug. His shoulders slumped, his eyes fell closed.

It was misty out, and the garden smelled like a graveyard.

“Jaak Froger’s about to break through, Somers.”

“Ask me, he’s about to break apart.”

“The city’s going to commission him to do a monument for Millionaires’ Park.”

“Yeah? I hope he comes up with something better than those.” I waved at a pair of incomplete figures that glared out from the atelier at us like a couple of juvenile delinquents behind bars.

“They’re supposed to be abstract, Somers. You don’t know about Froger?”

I knew. Jaak Froger’s first success had come with an exhibition in the S.M.A.K., Jan Hoet’s Museum of Contemporary Art. After that, he’d pulled off an impressive stunt, erecting twelve plaster monstrosities along the Graslei in a single night — the city awoke the next morning to their miraculous appearance, as if they’d been delivered from outer space by aliens.

In my opinion, Froger himself was the alien.

I also knew there were collectors who’d paid as much as half a million euros for one of Froger’s plaster tchotchkes. Come to think of it, the plaster cast I’d worn on my broken leg after crashing my Taunus was still lying around my apartment somewhere. It wasn’t all that big, but give it the right title and maybe Hoet would buy it for his mantelpiece, pay me enough that I wouldn’t have to waste any more of my time dealing with the Old Philosopher.

Anyway, I knew about Froger. In fact, I’d seen him, the day before. Him and his muse...

A day earlier, I crossed the atrium and shimmered into the atelier. In amongst the ugly headless statues I spotted a true work of art. She sat like a Roman goddess with a white sheet draped over her shoulders, facing the artist. Jaak Froger stood at an easel, sketching her with broad pencil strokes. I doubted that he generally needed sketches for his misshapen, hulking projects — but with a still life like that in front of me, I would have found some excuse to stand and stare at it, too.

She was simply irresistible. She held her proud chin high, and her red hair seemed to be in constant motion. Froger wasn’t satisfied with his sketch, and he strode up to her and readjusted the sheet to bare one of her shoulders and reveal another ten centimeters of creamy thigh.

I took a seat on a huge plaster head that lay on the floor near the easel.

“What is this, a city map?” I said, examining the sketch.

“If you don’t mind your tongue,” snarled Froger, “you’ll need a city map to find your way home.”

“I thought artists only got moody when the work wasn’t going well.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You apparently get moody when your seduction isn’t going well.”

“Get out of here, James. You’re throwing me off balance.”

“I was born off balance.” I winked at the red-headed model.

“You’re in the wrong room, James. My wife wants a foot massage.”

I tried to read the look on the model’s face. Her head was as motionless as a corpse’s, but the twinkle in her eyes was intended to reassure me. I nodded at her. Then Froger faced her and tipped his head at an angle. He smiled affably, but the girl didn’t react. Froger laid a hand on her thigh and patted it gently to indicate that it was time to take a break. She stood up and strolled off to smoke a cigarette.

“Even a butler ought to know that an artist and his model share an intimate relationship,” Froger told me.

“Would you have an intimate relationship with Margaret Thatcher if she was posing for you?”

“I make statues out of plaster, James, but I’m a man of flesh and blood.” He strode over to his easel, examined his sketch intently, and added a line here and there. If he needed that drawing to make his next sculpture, then I needed to fly to the Bahamas to eat a banana. His real motive was as obvious as Gene Simmons’ makeup.

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.

“You are Mr. Somers?”

“Patrick ‘Pat’ Isaac M. J. Somers, Jr.” I said, trying to keep up with the d’Oplinter Cruzes.

“Will you sit, please? I can’t see, but I prefer to be seen straight on, not in profile.”

I pulled up a chair and sat and winked broadly at her. Then I slowly drew my upper lip up to reveal my top teeth, à la Bogie. I decided to think of the woman with half a telephone book for a last name as Franny and undressed her with my eyes. I’d never had any problem with that stunt before, but it was more enjoyable when the woman could see me do it.

“I’ve been blind for four years, Mr. Somers.”

“I can beat that,” I said. “I haven’t been able to see or smell a thing in five years.”

“The agency told me you were amusing.” She forced a tight little laugh. “But let’s get down to business. Jaak Froger is my second husband. He’s an artist and spends most of his time in his studio in the back of the house. I need someone to keep me company during the day.”

She coughed away a catch in her voice. I raised my eyebrows.

She seemed to feel a change in my attitude.

“I hope I haven’t offended you,” she said.

“You’ve seen right through me. In my business, I have busy periods and slow spells. Right now, things are slow as molasses.”

“I might as well be dead for all the attention I get when my husband’s busy with his stinking plaster.”

She seemed a pleasant woman, well into her middle age, who didn’t mind looking the other way when it came to questions of etiquette.

“Well, I’m afraid I’m not very good company. I’m really more of a loner.”

“That doesn’t matter. I just want someone in the house for a few hours a day. Perhaps you can read to me a bit.”

I got to my feet and crossed to the baby grand on the far side of the room. I hadn’t played in a long time, but I ran my fingers across the keys and brought Erroll Gamer back to life for a few moments — a zombifled version of him, maybe, but still. A copy of Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise lay on top of the instrument. Yeah, Franny seemed to be the sort of dame who belonged back in the Roaring Twenties. I carried the book back to the chair and sat, flipped it open, and cleared my throat, but before I could get out a syllable, she stood up and groped her way to the window, almost knocking over a vase as she went.

“Mr. Somers, I told you that my husband no longer pays me any attention. Why don’t you go have a look at what he does pay attention to these days?”

She leaned forward, her forehead touching the window. Her pale calves were well worth looking at.

I nodded as I realized what she really was hiring me to do.

As I stood in the dark atelier trying to brush the plaster out of my hair, I thought back to the phone call that had set this whole chain of events in motion. Four days earlier, before the cops, before the model, before the lady of the house, I’d been hired by an insurance company. It seemed that a certain Francine Marie-Christine d’Oplinter Cruz had suffered from poor vision her entire life, but the company wanted to find out if the lady had truly been stricken blind four years earlier.

“We suspect,” my caller had told me, “that her claim is fraudulent.”

“Tell me about it,” I’d said.

“The woman receives a hefty payment every month because of her ‘blindness,’ and we think she’s concluded that we must be blind ourselves. You’ll be taking a position as a household servant, but in fact you’ll be working for us.”

“I don’t do windows,” I’d said — but I’d taken the job.

And now, four days later, I located the flashlight on the work table by the atelier’s window. I flicked it on and followed its beam of light like a bloodhound on a scent.

Something glittered behind one of the plaster grotesques. I headed that way and stumbled over a work in progress, which shattered like a china plate in a Greek restaurant. My attacker whirled towards me, but I swung my right arm in a wide arc and felt my elbow connect with its target.

In the flashlight’s beam, I saw a pair of black sunglasses lying amongst the plaster shards that littered the floor. I picked them up and set them on the bridge of a statue’s nose. Then I told Franny the game was up, and she crawled out from behind the gargoyle where she’d fallen. Even with one eye swollen shut and ass over teakettle, she held herself with perfect dignity.

“Enough already,” I said.

“This time I really couldn’t see where I was going.”

I forced a tight little laugh.

“I can see where you’re going,” I told her, “and you’re not gonna like it there.”

“How long have you known?”

“I suspected it when you almost knocked over that vase the other day. A blind woman would know exactly where every object in her house was located.”

I put out a hand and helped her to her feet. She leaned against a giant plaster sculpture. It seemed to be the only finished piece in the studio. Froger had apparently found his inspiration after all, although it really didn’t do much for me.

“I know it’s none of my business,” I said, “but there are easier ways to make a living.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she responded coldly. “I’ve never worked a day in my life.” “You’ve been busy,” I said, “filing your nails.”

“You have no idea what it’s like living with an egomaniac like Jaak.”

“I can imagine there were times when you couldn’t stand the sight of him, but there are limits.”

“I’m not a maid, Mr. Somers. You don’t think I’d spend my life cooking and cleaning for him?”

“No, not that, but you’d help him get away with a murder. Or did Helga realize you were faking, so you did what you had to do to protect your secret?”

She lowered her hand from her eye. It was already turning purple, but oddly enough, on her the color looked good. I wondered why a woman would hide herself away like this. She lived in another age, with other values and other norms. She called it elegance, but to me it read like pure indolence. After four years of putting on an act, she’d become literally blind to the world outside her home.

I shuffled my feet, wiping plaster from the soles of my Pumas.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“You’re not the only one who’s suddenly seen the light, darlin’.”

“Jaak and I went through hard times, Mr. Somers. My ‘blindness’ was the only way we could think of to generate an income — and it was barely enough to keep us going. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but I’ve never known a woman who’d go out and get a job while her husband stayed home and stared at other women’s nakedness. I believed in Jaak’s talent, but I wasn’t that blind.”

“But Helga didn’t want Jaak staring at her — so Jaak lost control of that file he was holding?”

“Jaak’s not just an artist. He’s like some kind of omnipotent god. If he can’t have what he wants, then no one can have it.”

“These bastards who think their ‘art’ entitles them to gallop off in any direction their dicks are pointing make me sick.”

Her head swiveled to gaze at the giant grotesque figure against which she was leaning. I shoved her into it, and they both fell to the ground with a crash. The statue cracked open like Humpty Dumpty.

She swallowed a scream and looked away.

I didn’t need the flashlight to see what Franny’s god had wrought. Froger’s poor, beautiful model had been immortalized in stinking plaster, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would never put Helga together again.