Madonna and Corpse

Chapter 8 Dubois

Jack Woods raises the back of his chaise longue and takes a slow, appreciative swig of sangria. Woods is a grizzled sixty-year-old Englishman; until six days before, he was a grizzled sixty-year-old Frenchman, Jacques Dubois. He’s working hard to inhabit the new name, but so far he still thinks of himself as Dubois.

His eyes shielded behind reflective sunglasses, he surveys the youthful bodies gleaming on the sand here at Cala del Home Mort—“Dead Man’s Beach”—a speck of Spanish coastline whose very name seems tailor-made for Dubois. With a few pale, doughy exceptions, the nude young men on display here are as tautly sculpted and bronze as any casting by Donatello or Rodin, and despite the name of the beach, they seem very much alive.

Dubois’s lover, François — one of the pale, doughy exceptions — dozes on a neighboring chaise. He’s neither attractive nor interesting, but he deserves Dubois’s undying gratitude. If not for the cadaver François spirited away from his Marseilles mortuary — a fifty-six-year-old heart-attack victim, whose body François replaced in the coffin with sandbags — Dubois could never have composed such an artful forgery of suicide: the charred body; the gunshot-shattered head; the pistol in the outstretched hand; even the new hairbrush, raked through the corpse’s hair and then planted on the bathroom counter. Yes, Dubois chose François wisely, and he does feel deeply grateful.

Nevertheless, he’s pondering how to rid himself of the pasty mortician, who, having served his purpose, begins to grow tiresome. Dubois needs to shed François without angering him — that is, without sending him running to the police — but it’s a tricky business. He has to think the breakup is his idea, Dubois realizes.

A nearby sunbather coughs, and the germ of an idea begins to incubate in Dubois’s mind. Perhaps if I came down with an illness, some malady, he muses. Something debasing and repellent, yet not so grave as to inspire nobility and self-sacrifice. Lip cancer? Irritable bowel syndrome? Cadaverous breath? Finally, in a flash of inspiration, it comes to Dubois: Warts — genital warts! Molded of silicone, they can be glued on, their ranks and size growing day by disgusting day. Best of all, Dubois can lay the blame at François’s own… door, since François — in a moment of drunken remorse — has confessed to three recent infidelities. (Dubois could have consoled François by making a similar confession, but instead he wept, a study in wronged innocence.) Yes, warts will do nicely; in a week — two, at most — François will scurry back to Marseilles, brimming with guilt and compassion. After a day or so of public melancholy, Dubois will set up an easel on the beach, sketch beautiful young men, and swap art for idyllic interludes with one Adonis after another.

Dubois will soon need a more meaningful outlet for his prodigious energies. But he has a plan for that, too. Only yesterday, on a stroll through town, he spotted an ad in a realtor’s window: “Private villa for lease.” The property — perched on a rocky bluff, with stunning Mediterranean views — includes a gardener’s cottage that would make a charming studio. Already, in a Barcelona warehouse an hour away, Dubois’s materials — sheaves of ancient paper and parchment, handmade pigments and brushes, musty frames and panels, even a few dreadful, sacrificial old paintings — await their metamorphoses into masterpieces.

He wishes he’d had the nerve to bring the Puccinelli, too, but the risk seemed too great. Astonishing, to think that a policeman — a provincial dolt! — possesses an authentic medieval masterpiece. For the moment, Dubois can appreciate the mirror-image ironies: the blissful ignorance of the museum in Avignon, proudly displaying its “original” Botticelli, and the ignorant bliss of the policeman, adoring his free “copy” of Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. Someday soon — perhaps with the help of some lithe, lock-picking Spaniard — Dubois will retrieve the original from the policeman, replacing it with an undetectable copy. The swap will be his third time to deceive the inspector, he realizes: first, with the pair of faked Botticellis; second, with the faked suicide (he smiles, recalling the daring ambiguity of the phrase “this sort of death”); soon, with the theft of a priceless painting from the policeman’s own home. All in all, a delightful hat trick.