As they got nearer to Paris, Professor Piot opened a second bottle and told them about the project they’d be working on, which had been pretty vague up until that point because he was still ironing out the details with the Musée du Patrimoine. They would be preparing an exhibition on the old church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. Built by butchers and torn down by revolutionaries, only its sixteenth-century bell tower was still intact, “a fine example of the flamboyant Gothic style,” Professor Piot said. The tower was being restored, and the work was costing the City of Paris a lot of money. Professor Piot had been hired to help prove that it was worth it. “We must make a good story for the schoolchildren,” he said.
“Perhaps we begin with the Paris of ancient times—” Professor Piot was a hand talker and there were five of them in four seats, which meant he hit either Neil or Loren, the other American, each time he made a point. “It is the dawn of the Christian faith in France, the city takes up only the space of Île de la Cité. Today this is where the tourists go for ice cream. But then we are in Roman times. There are barbarian invasions, the city is behind stone walls. And already economic life is outgrowing them. The dirty professions, the infected trades, they call them—the tanners, the furriers, the butchers—are kept outside. And so on the banks opposite the city a great market grows up—you have heard of Les Halles? Now it is an empty shopping mall, a catastrophe of urban planning, but for centuries it is the larder, the very pungent ventre, the gut, we can say, of the city—the history of Paris begins some seventeen centuries before refrigeration. And the butchers of this quarter, these men in bloodstained aprons, must rise very early each day, must work through the night even, but at dusk the gates to the city are locked. They cannot attend Mass, you see? Performing each day the most biblical, perhaps, of professions—this butchering of meat—they cannot even pray. And so these men set out to build their own church outside the city walls—” Professor Piot poured a little more into each of their glasses. “From its first days, this is a church of Paris. In this church the basins of holy water must be refreshed each hour because so many hands are dipping in covered with the blood of the slaughterhouse, the lye from the tanning shops, the soot and filth of the life of the city—” The train shot through a tunnel, the pressure made everyone’s ears pop.
It was in medieval times that the butchers named their church for Saint Jacques, patron saint of laborers and pilgrims, who brought the Christian faith to Spain, was beheaded by Herod, and, so the story went, assisted posthumously in the Crusades. The journey to his burial place in Spain had been one of the most important pilgrimages of the Middle Ages, Professor Piot said. The old pilgrim maps looked like nets spanning the length of the known world, with the butchers’ church as the pilgrims’ Paris starting point. “In this churchyard penitents from all over Europe are swapping boots, coughing on one another and spreading disease. Monks from Lille are speaking in Latin to friars from Cork. Rumors are spread of miracles, philosophies are interchanged, as well as recipes of poultices for blisters . . .” Neil tried to find a more comfortable way to be sitting on the armrest. Beth was taking notes and didn’t notice that Jean-Claude was drinking out of her glass.
The church had been destroyed in the spasms of anticlericalism that followed the French Revolution: “Torn stone from stone in the name of the new Republic and used—who knows? To pave the streets? To replace the cobblestones that had themselves been hurled from barricades?” Professor Piot loved that kind of thing, and his hands were flying all over the place. Neil pressed his head flat against the back of the seat, but still he got hit in the nose. Today, all that was left of the church was its bell tower, from which Pascal had supposedly studied the impossibility of a vacuum and quantified the weight of air, and where, even to this day, meteorological equipment monitored pollution levels at the corner of rue Saint-Martin and rue de Rivoli.
Professor Piot sent Jean-Claude to get another bottle and then with a flourish—Neil and Loren ducked—he gave them their research assignments. Jean-Claude, whose French was, obviously, the best, would be the liaison to the reconstruction crew, making sure that details of archaeological and architectural relevance were preserved. (“The very dirt on the walls is of interest to us,” Professor Piot said. “If the walls are clean then we must ask why there is no dirt, and that too is of interest.”) Professor Piot himself would concentrate on the medieval era, Loren would cover the Revolution, and Beth, who was getting a Ph.D. in architectural history, would be responsible for the renovations that had been made since Baron Haussmann decided to spare the church’s remaining belfry—now called the Tour Saint-Jacques—as he went about razing and reshaping Paris into a modern city. Neil’s job would be to track down anything that linked the church to the pilgrimage to Spain. “Okay, so bonne chasse,” Professor Piot said, raising his glass. “And remember—a church of the butchers. Find for me a history a little bit au jus, okay?”
By the time they got to Paris, Neil and the others were so dizzy from all that champagne that they barely made it off the train, but Professor Piot did a little soft shoe to the “Marseillaise” as soon as he touched the marble floors of the station. “We meet tomorrow at the Archives nationales, nine o’clock,” he said.
In London it had been sticky early summer, but in Paris, somehow, it was spring. On his first day off from work at the archives, Neil sat in a café and watched the reflections of glass windows slide across the old stones of a church. Cigarette ash blew onto him from the next table and he had to stop himself from sticking out his tongue to catch the flakes and let them melt like snow. He watched the little bits of ash floating in the foam of his beer and he thought that it was wonderful. Music was playing. Neil read a book by a French historian in French, looking up every word he didn’t know, and a pigeon hopped around his foot with a bit of string looped around one of its toes, as if it had something important to remember.
That summer Neil almost never got phone calls. He didn’t know anyone in Paris, except for Loren, Jean-Claude, and Beth, who were all in grad school and barely even spoke to him, and when his mom called with the weekly update on what mail he’d gotten and who from his high school was getting married, she did it on Skype. Not that many people had called Neil in London either, except Veejay sometimes to tell him to hurry home, zebras were having sex on the BBC. So when his phone rang during one of Professor Piot’s seminars, he didn’t even realize it was his.
It was Neil’s third week in Paris. He was supposed to be auditing the seminar as a way to ameliorate his French in between trips to the archives, but so far it had only messed up his English. His thoughts had taken on an incredibly stilted tone—ameliorate, for instance—and Professor Piot’s lecture that day wasn’t much more than a collection of separate words. Taken all together, they had something to do with the Vichy regime’s co-opting of the Joan of Arc mythology, which was one of Professor Piot’s favorite topics, although it was possible that Neil was mishearing and Jeanne d’Arc was really gendarmes and they were talking about Pétain’s special police. Possibly both.
So as Professor Piot paused while Neil’s phone rang and rang, Neil kept scribbling in his notes—a lot of unconnected phrases that trailed off into nothing when they got to the verb—while the rest of the class wondered what moron had “Frère Jacques” for his ringtone. When he finally realized that it was his phone that was ringing and started fumbling around with it to try to turn it off—in an excess of optimism he’d switched the settings to French—he silently cursed Veejay, whose idea of a going-away present had been to secretly download some boys’ choir trilling “sonnez les matines” to Neil’s phone.
At the break, while the class smoked and drank their little coffees out of plastic cups, Neil tried to check his voicemail, only he couldn’t remember the new code. He tried to look cool, like he was just texting somebody a really long message, and finally he got the number right. “One . . . new . . . message . . .” a voice sang out. Neil had accidentally put the phone on speaker. H
e pushed a bunch of buttons and missed hearing the person say her name, but right away he figured out that it was the girl he’d met in Swindon. “So, I am coming to London for taking the bus to Vilnius and I am wanting to ask you do you want to meet for a coffee, because I am going to be there for some hours? So, okay, that’s all. Maybe you can call me when you have some moment. Okay, good-bye.”
Neil only rarely had the opportunity to return girls’ phone calls, and when he did, he liked to spend some time rehearsing a casual tone and working up a joke or two. But he had a sudden desire to speak his own language in front of all the Sorbonne kids milling around outside the classroom, flopping their hair in their eyes and discussing existentialism in Fascist literature without saying the second halves of their words, that French university dialect designed to exclude American research assistants.
Neil pushed the buttons on his phone until he figured out how to call the number back.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hey, it’s Neil,” Neil said.
“Oh, yes.”
“I got your message and, gosh, I mean I’d love to meet up, but actually I’m not in London right now.” He liked the sound of his own voice, casually speaking a language the Sorbonne kids had to learn from books.
“Well, it’s okay,” she said. “It’s no problem, really, you are busy.”
“No, it’s not that, it’s just that I’m in Paris for the summer.”
“Oh you are in Paris?” she said.
“Yep, till August,” Neil said. “I’m doing some work for my professor.” There was a pause. “Shoot, I mean I’m really sorry. It would have been fun to get a coffee and all.”
“Actually this is perfect,” she said. “I am changing my bus in Paris.”
“Wow, really?” Neil said.
“Yes, for this I have gotten the most cheap ticket.” There was another pause. “I will come tomorrow in the morning at six o’clock into the station Gare du Nord. This is Paris?”
“Yeah,” Neil said. The class was filing back into the classroom and Professor Piot was already writing a list of dates on the board. “Wow, that’s great.”
“Yes, so we can meet there tomorrow,” she said.
“Cool,” Neil said. Six o’clock seemed awfully early. “We can have some croissants.”
It was frankly a surprise to hear from her again. Neil had called her up the day after he got back from Swindon to tell her about the camera in the medicine cabinet, and instead of being grateful to him for telling her and pissed at Barry for being such a creep, she had sounded almost amused, leaving Neil wondering, as usual, what he’d done wrong.
He’d worked up the nerve to call her after talking it over with Veejay, who wasn’t helpful at all, suggesting that Neil try to blackmail Barry into letting him see the videos and maybe getting a cut of the profits if he were, like, selling them on the Internet or something. “Don’t be an asshole,” Neil told Veejay, and Veejay did finally call his cousin who was a solicitor in Sheffield, and found out that yes, it was totally illegal to film people in the shower without them knowing it, and even though Barry could try to make the case that it was all in his own house, that argument almost never stood up.
So Neil had called Magdute to tell her that he was really sorry he hadn’t said anything right away, but that he had found a hidden camera behind a double mirror in the downstairs bathroom. He’d even gotten Veejay’s cousin to say he’d do a three-way call and talk to her about taking Barry to court, but she said she didn’t want to. Neil had planned a whole speech about how he felt like such a jerk for having waited a full twenty-four hours to tell her about it, but in the end he didn’t have to use it, because Magdute only said “Mmm” when he started back at the beginning and told her about the padlock on the medicine cabinet and the Altoids box with the hole in its side and that weird note. “So this camera is looking at the bath?” she asked, and when Neil said yes, Magdute said, “Ahh, okay,” and that was it. When he asked if she was still there she said, “Oh, yes,” and something in her voice made him think she was trying not to laugh. He wondered if maybe he was getting worked up over nothing, or if it was all a big joke on him. But as soon as he hung up the phone he told himself that he’d done the right thing. You couldn’t know that there was a secret camera in somebody’s bathroom and not say anything. And it really couldn’t have been some kind of twisted practical joke. The hole drilled through the Altoids box had had rust around it and the box was stuck to the shelf as if it had been there for a long time. Finally he decided that if it was a joke, it would have fooled someone way less gullible, and if it wasn’t, well Magdute was a grown-up. Now she knew, and she could do what she wanted.
So it wasn’t that Neil was unhappy that Magdute was coming to Paris, it just seemed like it might be sort of awkward. And it wasn’t very convenient. There was no good way to take the metro from Gare du Nord to the archives, and he’d have to carry all his books and papers with him if he was going to go straight there after she left. And it wasn’t like he and Magdute were friends. Neil thought about calling her back and telling her he couldn’t make it. But on the other hand, it wasn’t like Neil had girls calling him up every day, asking if he wanted to have a coffee.
Her call reminded him that he’d never sent his father the Christmas presents from her mother. The shopping bag Magdute had given him at the bus stop in Swindon only had a packet of Euro-style coffee in it, along with some woolen socks and a couple of sort of unflattering photos of a woman in front of a Christmas tree. Pretty crappy presents, and they showed that Neil’s father and Magdute’s mother didn’t know each other very well because Neil’s father didn’t even drink coffee.
The problem was that whenever Neil thought about sending the presents—and he really had thought about it, several times—he ended up thinking about Barry’s house and the girl in the party dress he’d seen behind the door. Her particular expression made things complicated. Obviously she hadn’t wanted to be seen, and the noise Neil made opening the bathroom door had startled her. But the look on her face, the way her eyes had gone wide and she pressed two fingers to her lips—Neil still wasn’t sure if she’d been warning him to keep quiet or asking him for some kind of help. Each time Neil started to look for a box to mail the presents home in, he would get to thinking about the last time he’d been looked at like that, and he’d end up deciding all over again that he couldn’t let his father know he’d ever been to Swindon. It was better for his dad to think that Neil had flaked and never made the trip than to have to tell him about the house with the pictures of naked girls and the camera in the medicine cabinet.
Old guys doing weird, probably illegal things involving young women was a subject Neil was never in a million years going to voluntarily bring up in a conversation with his father, who had practically been fired from his job as an English teacher for some stuff that had happened with a student. It had been a pretty big deal in their really small town, on the front page of the local paper for weeks during Neil’s eighth-grade year. The girl was also in eighth grade, which made the whole thing worse, and after one single, horrible confrontation, when Neil had said ugly things to his father and his father had cried, neither of them had ever mentioned the thing again.
The girl’s name was Becca Gallegos and she and Neil had known each other since they were kids. When Neil’s parents got divorced, he and his mom moved into the trailer park where Becca’s family lived and she and Neil would ride bikes together and dig for treasure in Neil’s backyard. Becca started out a grade ahead of Neil, so they weren’t in class together until middle school, when she got held back. It wasn’t that she was slow or anything, she just had a lousy home life and missed a lot of class. Which, Neil’s father said, was why she needed extra encouragement.
By the time Becca got to eighth grade she was a mess. She wore a bunch of eye shadow and went around looking spooked and scribbling things in a little notebook. It was that notebook that was Neil’s dad’s undoing, because he offered to
read some of her writing and began having her stay after class to discuss it. At some point Becca started telling people that Neil’s dad had done some inappropriate stuff and her father threatened to sue the school district.
Things got pretty ugly for a while. Neil’s dad didn’t do himself any favors by comparing the school board to the Inquisition and ranting about how the language arts department and the entire education system didn’t know the first thing about nurturing literary talent. He said he’d never touched her and she said he had. There was a hearing in front of members of the school board, but apparently there wasn’t much evidence of anything because Becca never pressed charges and they let Neil’s dad resign and keep his pension.
Neil would have dealt with the whole thing a lot better if he hadn’t known for a fact that his father was lying. As it was, when kids on the bus would say, “Hey, Beart, how’s your dirty old man?” and laugh like that was hilarious, he’d feel all the blood go to his face, but there was nothing really for him to say. He’d hunch down farther in his seat and draw designs in the mist his breath left on the school bus window.
Neil had taken Professor Piot’s “Methods of Historical Analysis” class while he was in London, and they’d talked about the theory of path dependence, in which events happened in a chain reaction, like a domino effect. One event caused a second, which caused a third, which made it all but impossible that a fourth could be avoided, which led, by necessity, to a fifth, and so on, history hurtling toward a foregone conclusion. It was a way of looking at things that Professor Piot, and, one gathered, all serious historians, looked down on, because a path-dependent explanation of, say, why the Fourth Crusade ended up sacking Constantinople rather than reclaiming the Holy Land didn’t take into account the thousand unpredictable nuances of how, why, and when, much less the decision-making role of individuals involved. The schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches may have set the stage for a confrontation between East and West, but who was to say that the Crusaders would have plundered their fellow Christians if their leader hadn’t been charmed at a dinner party by a pretender to the Byzantine throne? “Doubt all claims of the inevitable,” Professor Piot liked to say.
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