Since he had been informed of this, he believed every day to be his last.
Three weeks ago, in the middle of the night, he had woken to find an apparition in his apartment, an immaculately dressed man sitting in his chair, his eyes closed. The keymaker couldn’t imagine what he was doing there, or whether or not he was dreaming, for the figure didn’t look quite of this world. The raw scream hurt his throat as it made its embarrassed entrance into the room. The man in the chair opened his eyes. Dark and deadly, they were staring right through him.
‘Citizen Quint,’ said this stranger, getting up and holding out a red-kid-gloved hand. ‘I have a commission for you.’
He’d been given a month to create the impossible. He’d worked night and day, obliged to use a friend’s furnace for the purpose. His whole life’s work had gone into that one key. It was his masterpiece and in itself it held great beauty. He had kept the design simple. Cast in silver, as requested, the bow was a circle in which stood a man, held in the wheel of life. The column was elegant and the bit was cut in the shape of the Ace of Spades. In this, if in nothing else, he had the measure of the man who commissioned it. But a key to a soul? What could he say? That such a thing was beyond him? In a week’s time the nocturnal visitor would return personally to collect it. The very thought of seeing him again had robbed the keymaker of his reason, made him dizzy, as if the walls of the apartment were closing in on him. If they got any closer he would be squashed like an insect.
Then the voice had started, a woman’s voice, gentle but insistent.
‘The devil’s own is on your trail. Run like the wind.’
The words never changed. She never stopped, night and day, until the hinges of his reason loosened.
He staggered, clutching the sides of his head.
‘Stop it,’ he shouted. ‘Stop it. I am not mad!’
Wide-eyed he looked at the door. Yes, that’s what he needed, fresh air. He walked, then ran down the stairs. He had to get away. On the landing he bumped into the cobbler.
‘Look where you’re going,’ said the cobbler, then seeing the state of him asked, ‘You all right, citizen? You’re not going out like that, are you? You haven’t got your shoes on.’
Remon Quint saw nothing but the foot of the staircase. The voice in his head drowned the cobbler’s words so that he appeared like a fish mouthing silently at him. Everything had slowed down. In the street he gasped for air, not knowing where he was or where he should be, and with the voice near shouting in his head it came to him what he must do. He had to drown out the sound. He walked like a man possessed; even the cuts in his stockinged feet didn’t register. At the Pont Neuf he stood looking down into the brown stained water of the Seine, like a man about to savour the first sip of a longed-for cup of coffee.
Basco had been on an errand for Citizen Aulard. The tumbrils trundled past him, filled with the living dead, a drumbeat following them to their mass grave, a footnote to be forgotten in the folds of history. He took his time walking back to the Circus of Follies, thinking how much Paris had changed since the heady days of the fall of the Bastille, when everything had seemed brand new, a clean page. Who would have imagined that the rest of the Revolution would be written in blood?
Citizens scurried past, heads down, terrified lest they be stopped, each believing the other to be a spy or an informer. Never had Basco known the city so starved of joie de vivre.
He was halfway across the Pont Neuf when he noticed a man without hat or shoes, and thought he was behaving strangely. But didn’t everyone behave strangely these days?
Then he realised what Remon Quint was doing. As the keymaker climbed on to the parapet of the bridge Basco charged like a bull, desperate to get to him before it was too late. He saw him jump, heard a woman scream, saw an orange spill from her basket and roll away between the legs of passers-by. He grabbed at what he prayed wasn’t thin air and found he had the keymaker dangling by his shirt.
‘Let me go, please let me go. If you have any mercy, let me go.’
Basco had no intention of doing so. Another man came to his aid and together they pulled the keymaker back on to the bridge.
‘I want to die,’ he said.
The crowd was already parting to let three national guards through.
‘Papers,’ said one of the Bluecoats to Basco. ‘Now.’
Basco, whose sense of his failure as an actor had been acute, thought little about outwitting the guard.
‘My friend is very sick,’ he said. ‘He has a fever in the brain.’
‘Papers,’ repeated the guard, unimpressed.
Basco propped his new friend against the bridge as he struggled to find his documents.
The Bluecoat looked bored. Basco knew that bored officialdom was far more dangerous than occupied officialdom and these three were pushing for an arrest. Then a woman screamed.
‘Stop that man! He’s stolen my bread! Stop, he’s a ratbag of a Royalist!’
The guards, having found something worthy of their attention, left Basco and rushed after the thief, swords and guns rattling.
Basco wasted no time. Heaving the keymaker up like a sack of potatoes, and not a very heavy sack at that, he headed back to the safety of the Circus of Follies.
Chapter Twelve
‘Bread and theatres, whatever next?’ cried Citizen Aulard, his operatic eyebrows rising ever upwards as his face fell like a curtain. ‘I am now expected to give free performances to distract the citizens of Paris from their rumbling stomachs. Mort bleu! In return for what? Worthless paper money!’
He stuffed his hands into his waistcoat pockets.
Tetu, sitting with Iago as usual perched on top of his head, said nothing.
‘What a wretched morning. A member of the Committee of Public Safety paid us a visit, inspected the theatre and wrote copious notes. Did you know that eau de nil green is an aristocratic colour?’
He stared for a moment at the ceiling as if from it might come salvation.
‘I’ve been ordered to repaint the auditorium. Please,’ he said tilting his head right back, ‘tell me when this stupidity will end. So many people dead, the prisons fit to bursting and the scum of the streets now rule the country and want everything painted bleu, blanc, rouge. Mort bleu!’
‘Vive la Nation!’
‘Will you keep that parrot quiet? And that is another thing. My parrot, Iago. My parrot now seems to be your parrot and, what’s more, is talking far too much.’
He let out a heartfelt sigh and carried on with his list of woes, which were many.
‘Why do they have to fiddle with everything? Three days of every decade, in this new calendar. Do you understand it?’
Citizen Aulard continued, not waiting for an answer, ‘No, it would be much better if they had kept the weeks, and just said that three days out of every ten we have to put on shows that will appeal to the empty stomachs of sans-culottes, to serve up a visual feast full of hot air and patriotic dribble. The other seven days we can do The Harlequinade.’
‘This is very obliging of them,’ said Tetu.
‘How so?’
‘Because it gives us three days when Yann and Didier won’t be missed. They’ll stand a better chance of getting to the coast and back again before the next show.’
‘How long will all this go on for?’ asked Citizen Aulard.
In truth the visit of the member of the Committee of Public Safety had made him realise just how vulnerable their operation was.
Quite what Tetu’s answer would have been remained a mystery, for at that moment Basco and Yann entered the room. Between them they carried the semiconscious body of a shoeless middle-aged man.
Yann laid him on the day bed.
‘I found him,’ said Basco, by way of explanation, ‘about to throw his life into the Seine.’
‘Oh wonderful, just what we need! And of course you thought straight away, I know, Citizen Aulard has hardly anything to do, and nothing to hide; I will take him to the Circus of Fol
lies.’
‘No, no, Signor Aulard, it wasn’t like that,’ said Basco. ‘He was in trouble, no papers, and I thought—’
Citizen Aulard brought his fist down on the desk. ‘Heaven protect me from a thinking fencing master! What are we now? Home to every stray, barefoot citizen found perching on the Pont Neuf about to answer to his maker?’
‘That was not in my thinking,’ said Basco. ‘Yann said I should bring him here. I’d only intended to give him some brandy and some of my mother’s homespun wisdom, then take him back to wherever he lives.’
‘And Yann, why did you bring him up here?’
‘Because he has something on his mind that struck me as unusual.’
‘Have we all gone mad?’
‘That’s hard to know,’ said Yann. ‘Still you don’t often come across a shoeless man raving about how to make a key to a soul.’
‘What?’ said Citizen Aulard.
‘Quiet,’ said Tetu, ‘he’s coming round.’
Remon Quint sat up, looking the colour of the auditorium. He was completely at a loss as to how he came to be surrounded by a strange assortment of people, one of whom was a dwarf with a parrot on his head.
‘Do you remember your name?’ asked Tetu.
‘Yes. Remon Quint.’
Citizen Aulard peered more closely at the man propping himself up on his day bed.
‘No! Surely not the celebrated keymaker from the rue du Lapon?’ He adjusted his spectacles. ‘It cannot be. He is a very respected gentleman who wore, if my memory serves me well, the most handsome wigs and—’
‘You know this man?’ interrupted Tetu, with surprise.
‘Well, I know of him. He is a supreme craftsman. Of course, I never could afford one of his keys or locks. His customers were kings and princes. It was said that Marie Antoinette and King George of England commissioned keys from him.’
‘Thank you kindly, sir,’ said the keymaker, ‘but all that was in another age, alas, all gone, washed away by the Revolution.’ He tried to stand. ‘Forgive me, I have inconvenienced you long enough and …’ He stopped and stared in amazement at his stockinged feet as if they belonged to someone else. ‘Where are my shoes?’
‘You didn’t have them on at the Pont Neuf,’ said Basco.
‘The Pont Neuf? What was I doing there?’ He held the sides of his head.
‘Shall I take you home?’ asked Basco.
Remon Quint had round eyes in a large round head on a small neat body. He looked not unlike a stick balancing a ball. The memory of what he had been doing began to come back, and his eyes looked as if they were about to pop out of his head.
‘I can’t go back,’ he said. ‘The voice will return. This is the first time since he came that she’s been silent.’
‘Would you like to tell us what the voice said?’ asked Tetu, handing him a cognac, and knowing what the answer would be.
‘She never stopped. She said, over and over again, “The devil’s own is on your trail. Run like the wind.”’
Yann broke the silence that greeted his words.
‘Anis,’ he said.
‘I t is an incredible story,’ said Citizen Quint. ‘Things like this don’t happen, not to me. I am an ordinary man.’
Citizen Aulard said, ‘We are all of a theatrical disposition here and when I tell you that nothing is beyond the realms of possibility, I say it to comfort you and give you the courage to speak.’
‘You will think me mad, perhaps I am.’
‘I think you are exhausted,’ said Tetu, with such authority that the keymaker felt his mind settling itself on the solid ground of rational thought.
So he started his story and he told it well; when he had finished you could have heard a pin drop.
‘Where is the key now?’ Yann asked Remon Quint.
‘On my workbench.’ He stopped, took out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead. ‘It’s my finest work.’
Yann set off across the Pont Neuf towards the rue de Rivoli. Here at the Pavillion de Marson was the noisome quarter of dingy houses intersected by narrow alleys which extended from the rue St-Honore to the Place du Carrousel. He found the house just as the keymaker had described. It was a tall tenement building which looked as if it had been stretched upwards to accommodate all its inhabitants; it hummed with life like a beehive. Yann took his time and decided that it would be better observed from the cafe across the road, though when he entered the place the smell of unwashed flesh and smoke made him instantly regret his decision. Having taken a table he felt that to leave straight away would draw unwanted attention to himself. He peered through the steamed-up window. Sobriety was a foreign word to the collection of drunks and misfits in the cafe, all of whom had the look of those who have sacrificed their souls to the bottle. The floor was covered in a matting of filthy sawdust, solid in parts where no one had the strength, or the will, to sweep it away.
To the disgust of the waiter Yann ordered coffee. At the next table sat a man with a bright-red face. He was dressed in a worn cotton jacket which had seen better days and had a red cap on his head. He was in the middle of lecturing a citizeness who was only slightly less drunk than him. She at least wasn’t slurring her words.
Yann watched the comings and goings of the building opposite, half-listening to their conversation.
‘No, woman, the way to feed the people is simple. We should be able to serve up aristocratic meat.’
‘What?’ said the citizeness, sniffing. ‘How aristocratic? I don’t mind where the blooming cow comes from as long as I have something to eat.’
Yann wondered, if purgatory did exist, whether it would be a cafe like this.
‘I tell you, woman, if the butcher Citizen Loup was still alive he would have done it, he would have sold meat from the guillotine.’ The man stopped to yell at the waiter for more brandy.
‘That’s disgusting,’ said the citizeness, spitting out her drink. ‘That makes me sick to my guts!’
‘Well, woman, this city is plagued by famine. It’s one way those stuffed-up, good-for-nothing, greedy, inbred aristos can bring about equality. After all, they eat only the very best food, so they should taste good.’
‘You are talking codswallop, you are.’
‘All right then, would you prefer that we kill all the cats and dogs to eat instead?’
‘That would be a daft thing to do.’
‘Why? Cat and dog not to your taste?’
‘No, all I mean is, if we did that, what would kill the rats?’
The sans-culotte, realising that he’d been got the better of, grunted. ‘The trouble with you, woman, is that your brains don’t work.’ He turned to Yann for support. ‘But it doesn’t matter, does it, because we’re all going to be equal.’
‘Equal in what?’ asked Yann. ‘For you say that you have a better brain than your companion, so if you’re right, where is the equality?’
‘Take no notice, citizen,’ said the woman. ‘It’s just a bee in his bonnet. Equality? I can’t see it myself.’
Yann asked, ‘Have you heard the one about the king who made all men equal by the simple means of an iron table?’
‘No. How?’
‘Everyone who came to his kingdom was forced to lie on the iron table. If you were too short for it, your legs would be stretched on the rack; if you were too long for it, your legs would be chopped off to fit. That way the king could guarantee all men were equal.’
The man looked foxed. ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘Neither did anyone who had to lie on the iron table, but they all had to live with the crippling consequence.’
The woman burst out laughing.
‘Are you a comedian?’ she asked.
Yann drank up his coffee and paid his bill. ‘No, I leave that to the likes of your friend here with his taste in meat.’
The citizen lurched to his feet. ‘You’re making fun of me. No one makes fun of me. I will show you equality and you too, woman, if you don’t shut your trap.’ He went to take a swi
ng at Yann. Mysteriously, he missed his footing and fell flat on his face.
The waiter rushed forward as Yann, stepping over the prostrate man, winked at the woman, who sat there chuckling.
Outside the sun hit the narrow street in intense strips of light. A queue for bread stretched all the way round the corner. A scuffle had started by the door of the baker’s shop between two women who were fighting tooth and claw over a loaf of bread. The crowd, bored with waiting, goaded them on.
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