By the time she got there, people were packed tight in the stifling shop. After purchasing one of the last chickens, Clarie stepped, triumphant and relieved, into the street. At least here, despite the afternoon heat, she could breathe. She was approaching a cart selling fruit when she heard the news hawker.
“Who killed the Angel of Anarchy? Is Paris Under Threat? Read about the Angel of Death in today’s Petit Parisien.” The boy, who could not have been much more than ten, strode through the rue Condorcet, shouting at the top of his lungs and waving a newspaper.
“Madam?” the farmer, who had spotted Clarie surveying his produce, tried to get her attention.
“Oh, sorry, not now, maybe later,” she murmured, staring as the boy passed them. Sunday was the day when the cheap Paris dailies printed their illustrated editions. She had to see the picture. She needed to know if they were talking about Angela. Squinting toward the picture he was holding up, Clarie followed the hawker, who had attracted a small crowd. She did not have to push through them to recognize the subject of the tabloid drawing: Angela Laurenzano as she had seen her in the coffin, as the morgue had dressed her, in white, like an angel.
Clarie didn’t want anyone to see her buying the scandal sheet, yet she had to know what they were saying about the Laurenzanos. She pretended to be examining the dresses in a store window until she heard the throng around the newsboy dissipate. When the shouts and footsteps died down, she turned back toward the street.
“Garçon!” she called, trying to catch him before he got away.
“Yes, lady?” The boy stopped. She saw that his face was grimy and bruised. Who had done this to him? Did he have to sell a certain number of papers to go home safe, or was he apprenticed to a cruel printer? Is this how Angela had looked after a night spent with Barbereau? Clarie took in breath. She knew so little about the city’s life outside her family and the school.
“A paper,” she managed.
“Five centimes, it’s the Sunday special.”
Her trembling fingers searched for a sou in the sack hanging from her wrist. She wanted to get the transaction over with as quickly as possible.
“There,” she dropped the coin into his hand. Without even a thank-you, he thrust a copy of the Sunday Petit Parisien Illustré into hers.
She tucked the paper in her basket and headed up the rue Turgot as fast as she could without attracting attention. I’ll tell Bernard the stores were crowded. I’ll say I met one of the teachers on the way home. I’ll—She could hardly believe that she was already spinning a camouflage of lies around the simple act of buying a newspaper. But in her heart, she knew it was not so simple. Bernard was so set against her having anything to do with the Laurenzanos.
Aware of the fluttering in her chest, Clarie took special care to cross the wide street to the Square d’Anvers. When she reached the little park, she plopped down on an unoccupied bench, grateful for the meager shade offered by a young tree. She wiped her damp forehead with the back of her gloved hand before summoning the courage to look at Angela’s picture again. The headline read ANGEL OF DEATH.
With trembling fingers, Clarie turned from the full-page illustration to get to the story.
Paris has been deceived! The police have been deceived! Angela Maria Laurenzano was neither an innocent angel nor an accidental victim of a senseless cruel crime, but the deceiving lover of two men recently murdered on the Paris streets. Evidence is mounting that she plotted with the dead anarchist Pyotr Ivanovich Balenov to kill and rob her boss, the deceased Marcel Barbereau, who was fished out of the Basin de la Villette ten days ago. We must also assume that the Russian, his angelic-looking lover and their dastardly accomplices plotted to set off a bomb on one of the capital’s fashionable boulevards. Instead, as we know, the bomb killed him before he could cart it out of the Goutte-d’Or quarter.
Clarie let the opened newspaper drop in her lap and stared into space, trying to conjure up her first meeting with Francesca’s daughters. She did not want to believe that Angela had willfully practiced deception, that she had had two lovers, that she was a terrorist. She pictured Angela sitting in the front row of the classroom, innocent and afraid, obedient to her mother’s wishes to seek Clarie’s help. Or so it seemed. Clarie had seen the traces of bruises on Angela’s face. She knew the girl had been beaten. Yet as time passed she had become more and more certain that Francesca’s daughters had not told the entire truth about Marcel Barbereau’s death or about their relationship with the Russian anarchist. Were they really terrorists, or just girls in trouble? Terrible trouble. But, if that were the case, why would anyone kill Angela?
Thinking, reasoning calmed Clarie down. She bent over the article, scouring it for some proof, some logic. She found very little, even though, according to the newspaper, the police thought they had all the answers. An inspector Alain Jobert asserted that the deaths of Marcel Barbereau, Pyotr Balenov and Angela Laurenzano could not be “mere coincidence.” He hypothesized that Angela had been killed by a “fellow violent anarchist, who was afraid her loyalty to their cause perished in the explosion that killed her Russian lover.” The article concluded with the inspector’s clever turn of phrase. “If Angela Laurenzano was the weak link in the plots, then her sister, Maura Laurenzano, has become the missing link.” The police had searched yesterday and not been able to find her.
Brow furrowed, Clarie fell back against the bench. Maura, missing? She had really taken off, and poor Francesca was left with two daughters gone and no idea of what they had gotten themselves into. Clarie’s heart ached for her, but she didn’t know what to do. Or what or who to believe. Bernard said the union anarchists he worked with had abjured violence, if only because the terrorists and their associates had been persecuted, rooted out by the police years ago. And yet the police inspector claimed the Laurenzano girls might have been part of a gang. Clarie’s every instinct cried out against this. At least some of what she had heard and seen at their first meeting had to be true. Both girls had sworn that Pyotr was gentle and would never have planted a bomb. They had told her about Barbereau’s cruelties. Maura, especially, was sure that no one in authority, including Clarie, would help or believe them. Clarie grimaced as she once again acknowledged the possibility that Maura’s scornful attitude toward her was justified. The girl perceived Clarie as someone with neither the will nor the power to help them. Bitter Maura, clever Maura had managed to penetrate Clarie’s soul. She pitied Francesca, as a mother, but she was beginning to realize that Maura was the one she could not forget, a girl with intelligence and determination. A girl who desperately wanted to live and strive. A girl worth saving.
Numbly, she rose from the bench. She folded the paper with quiet, deliberate motions before putting it in the basket. Strawberries: she had to find strawberries.
Fifteen minutes later, having tracked down one of the last farmer’s carts near the square, Clarie hurried into her building. She paused before climbing the stairs, and retreated. The concierge kept her cleaning supplies under the staircase. She would enjoy a copy of the illustrated paper. Clarie folded the journal and placed it near a bucket and mop. There was no reason to disturb her Sunday with Bernard, she reasoned. He’d find out about the accusations against Angela soon enough. By tomorrow, the tabloids would be pasted on walls and hanging from every kiosk. She was not really keeping any secrets from him.
7
THE SHARP WHISTLE PIERCED THROUGH the courtyard, rousing Maura from a restless sleep. Her head was heavy and aching. After last night, she had no idea how she was going to face Yvette and Mimi at the washhouse. She had been so stupid.
The second whistle tore through her torpor. It was a signal. Except for the concierge and a few other nosy biddies, the inhabitants of the tenement hated and feared the police, and did everything to protect each other from “the law.”
Maura sprang to the window. An early-arriving carpenter from one of the workshops in the courtyard watched near the entrance as two uniformed policemen and the st
ocky inspector who had questioned her at the morgue came in. She had to hide. She raced into the hall and began violently to rattle the door next to hers. If the deaf mute was awake, she prayed that he would see the movement of the door. If not, she would rip it open with her own arms.
She almost fainted with relief when gnarled old Monsieur Gaston answered. Frantically she drew him to his window where they could see the last policeman entering the staircase below. She pointed to herself and then under his bed. He nodded. He understood. It was the only place to hide. Like Maman and Maura, he lived in one small room.
Maura crawled shaking under his narrow bed, careful to avoid the chamber pot near her feet. As she flattened herself out on the dusty, rough floor, she found another reason for regret. How often she had made fun of the deaf-mute’s animal grunts and moans. She had always thought him stupid, even when he shared his extra bread with her mother. Now she had to hope that he was smart enough to fool the police. She pressed her lips together, determined not to make a sound. She heard the police thunder up the rickety stairs and begin to pound on her mother’s door. When her mother answered, their shouts and threats reverberated through the thin wall, but Maura could not make out the words. After a few minutes, the voices died down. She heard the table and bed screeching on the wood floor, the sounds of a search. Then more threats. Then steps coming to Monsieur Gaston’s door. Since he could not hear, he did not move from his table, where he sat eating his morning bread.
More and different steps up the staircase. Maura grimaced with the effort of trying to make out what the sounds meant.
“What are you doing?” It was Mme Guyot. “This poor woman is still in mourning!” Did they have Maman? Were they hurting her? Maura’s first instinct was to go to her rescue. When her foot almost tumbled the chamber pot, she stopped. She had to be rational. She was the one in real danger.
“And that poor man in there is deaf. He can’t hear you,” Mme Guyot continued just outside the door. For the first time in her life, Maura felt admiration for the big, raw-boned laundress, who showed no fear, even of the police.
“Madame, this is none of your—”
“It is. Francesca Laurenzano is my friend, an honest woman.”
The idiot policeman kept on knocking, and Maura was sure that even if she suppressed her breathing, her thumping heart would give her away.
“Here, let me,” Mme Guyot said. Maura heard the door shifting back and forth. Through the ragged edges of Monsieur Gaston’s covers, she saw his carpet slippers amble toward it. They were soon joined by four shoes, good shoes, pushing themselves forward into the room.
Maura recognized the inspector’s voice as he shouted, “Have you seen Maura Laurenzano?”
The tailor inched himself in front of the bed and sat down, his legs and feet well-positioned to block the policeman’s view of everything underneath except the chamber pot. The deaf-mute responded with his version of a mumbling denial.
The inspector, obviously exasperated, told one of his men to get “that woman.” “Maybe she can get him to talk.”
Mme Guyot’s clogs tramped into the room. Maura imagined her making signs and motions, toward the room next door, the room where a policeman must be standing guard over Maman.
All at once Monsieur Gaston began to grunt and moan even louder. From the way the bed was shaking she knew that he was waving his arms and pointing, employing the same gesticulations that had inspired all the kids in the tenement, including Maura, to make fun of him.
“What is he saying?” the inspector asked angrily.
“He’s afraid, I think. He doesn’t know what you are talking about,” Mme Guyot said.
But the tailor went on and on, louder and louder, shaking the bed harder and harder. It was like an earthquake coming down on Maura.
“Can’t he answer a simple question?” The inspector’s voice rose higher.
“He can’t hear, he can’t speak. He’s a poor tailor who barely feeds himself.”
Maura didn’t have to see Mme Guyot to know that she had crossed her arms, waiting for the inspector to come to his senses and stop berating the old man. After all, didn’t he understand that this was Monsieur Gaston’s attempt to communicate? Or—as Maura listened, hardly breathing, a tentative grin spreading across her face—was this the deafmute’s attempt not to communicate, to make everyone so disgusted they would just leave him alone? She pressed her fingernails into her palms contritely. She would never make fun of him again.
When the well-shod feet and the clogs left the room, Maura sensed the deaf-mute’s calm return to his seat by the window. She heard the shuffling rearrangement of Monsieur Gaston’s table and then a sigh. Time to get to work. Maura understood. She and Angela had always started working on the shirtwaists early in the morning, as close to the window as possible, afraid to waste even a moment of free light.
Maura did not know how long she lay there, breathing in the smell of Monsieur Gaston’s pungent, unwashed bedding, in constant fear that a rat or mouse would crawl out of a hole to torment her. She kept an ear to the floor in the hope of hearing the policemen’s progress through the building. But she heard nothing except the tenement waking up: sleepy voices heading out to work or, through the window, the grinding and sawing tools of the men who labored in the shops around the courtyard.
Finally, Monsieur Gaston knocked on the floor by the bed and waved his hand. She crawled out, and he took her by the sleeve of her nightgown and led her to the window to show her that the policemen were leaving.
Her chest began to heave as she slapped the dust off her nightgown. She had to pee, to cry out, anything. She had held everything in under the bed. “I must go see my Maman,” she told Monsieur Gaston. And then she almost laughed at herself. She pointed to her chest and to the wall that separated their rooms. He nodded.
“Thank you, thank you,” she said as tears came rolling down her cheeks. “Thank you.” She kissed him on both cheeks, bringing a smile to his face, the first real smile she had ever seen from him. She took his hand, but he waved her off, pointing to her mother’s room.
Wiping her nose on the sleeve of her gown, Maura quickly padded out of the room in her bare feet and knocked on her mother’s door. “Maman, it’s me. Maura.”
The door flew up and her mother grabbed her, holding her tight. “I can’t lose you!” she cried.
“Don’t worry, Maman, everything is going to be all right,” Maura said as she untangled herself from her mother’s embrace. She brushed a kiss on her mother’s forehead, remembering how she loved those gentle reassuring kisses that Maman used to give her when she was a little girl.
Suddenly her mother drew away from her. “What have you done?” she cried, breaking the mood.
“What do you mean?” Fear thudded in Maura’s chest. Had they told her mother about her role in disposing of Barbereau’s body?
“Look at this,” her mother stretched out an arm. “Look what they did.” She stepped aside, forcing Maura to take in the destruction. Clothes on the floor, pots and pans swept from the shelf, even the chamber pot kicked from under the bed, lying on its side. “They were searching for dynamite, for stolen money. They said that you and Angela plotted with that boy to blow people up, that you murdered Barbereau because he was a boss.”
“It’s not true.” Although part of it was, of course. But Pyotr had only hit Barbereau because he was beating Angela. He had not meant to kill him.
“They said you were anarchists, violent. Like the Italian who killed the French president three years ago.”
“Maman, it’s not true.” And once more Maura felt the urge, the impossible urge to tell everyone about the real Pyotr, how good and kind he was. “Let me—” She pointed to the chamber pot, righted it, then lifted her gown and peed. “I’ll take it down later,” she said as she stood up.
“Don’t worry about that. Tell me what you’ve done,” her mother demanded.
“Nothing, Maman, nothing bad, really bad. We’d never hurt
people. It’s Barbereau who was hurting Angela.”
“I don’t want to hear about that,” Maura’s mother cried and covered her ears. “I don’t want to know what he did to her, my poor baby.”
The warm opening in Maura’s heart froze and closed a little. Whose fault was it that Angela had gotten involved with that bastard, made to have sex with him, take his blows? And why care about what had happened to Angela, who was dead, when Maura was standing in front of her mother, alive and in trouble? But instead of embracing her again, Francesca turned, held out her arms, hands clasped, toward the crucifix over her bed. “Oh, sweet Jesus, what have I done, what have I done to deserve this?”
“Nothing, Maman, nothing,” Maura muttered as she went over to the window to make sure that none of the police were still about.
“All I’ve done is try to put bread on the table, and now my little girl is gone and the police are accusing me.” Her mother’s pleas to the inert cross continued.
“Maman, don’t worry, the police know you are innocent.” How could they not? How could anyone believe that pious Francesca Laurenzano would break a law?
Maura’s mother bowed her head and turned back to her daughter. “Are you going to the laundry today? It’s Saturday. Mme Guyot’s busiest time.”
“No.” Maura shook her head. “The police are probably going there right now. And besides,” she put her hand over her belly, “I don’t feel well.” As proof, she sidled past her mother and plopped down on the bed, folding her knees against her chest. Even if the police weren’t there, she wasn’t going to face Yvette or Mimi. She had to figure out what to do next.
“Then I’ll go.”
If her mother expected Maura to object, to save her from the bruising labors of that horrible place, she was mistaken. Something had hardened again between them. If she insisted on being the martyr, so be it, Maura thought. Besides, if Maura came up with a plan, it would be better for her mother if she didn’t know anything about it. Maman should go.
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