by Judith Rock
“Shut your mouths,” he yelled over his shoulder. “This death-bird gives good alms, he gave me this coat.”
Charles picked up the broadsheet from the cobbles and smiled reassuringly at the reader.
“Where did you get this, mon ami?”
The young man ran. Seeming to catch his fear, the others ran, too, and the old man limped after them, yelling at them to stop and cursing them for idiots. They rounded the corner of St. Étienne des Grès and Charles followed them, wondering suddenly where they sheltered. But in the scant moments it took him to reach the side street that ran in front of the college of Les Cholets, they disappeared. He turned back to the rue St. Jacques, studying the broadsheet as he went. This sheet, at least, still had only the one verse, which was somewhat reassuring. No printer’s name, of course—no one would put his name to an effort to stir up unrest and disturb the city’s peace.
As Charles neared the postern door, a shop sign on the college façade creaked in a burst of wind. Charles looked up. The sign’s crusty, golden loaf of bread made him smile, thinking of the LeClercs, the family of bakers who rented the shop and its living quarters. Mme LeClerc and her small daughter Marie-Ange had taken him to their hearts when he arrived last summer, helping him when he’d sorely needed it. The family should soon be back in Paris from their Christmas visit to M. LeClerc’s brother in the nearby village of Gonesse.
His spirits lightened a little by that thought, Charles went to the rector’s office, where he found Père Le Picart sitting by the fireplace, his breviary in his hand.
“I see news in your face, Maître du Luc,” Le Picart said. “Please, sit.”
Charles took the chair on the other side of the hearth and loosened his cloak. “News indeed, mon père. Henri Brion is dead. Stabbed to the heart.”
Le Picart crossed himself. “Brion? Dear God. So that is why the poor man never came to see me?”
“I don’t know how long he’s been dead. A beggar found him in a midden ditch near the Place Maubert. Someone came from the Brion house to tell me, and I’m just back from seeing the body.”
“May God receive his soul. This is the last thing I expected! Certainly the last thing we needed. Of course,” he added dryly, “poor Monsieur Brion hardly needed it, either. Were the police there? Is there any thought of who killed him? Or why?”
“Lieutenant-Général La Reynie was there. He has gone to question a goldsmith called Bizeul who, according to one of The Procope’s waiters, took Brion forcibly out of the coffeehouse on Thursday night. The waiter and a woman who was begging at the coffeehouse door say that this Bizeul and another man pretended that Brion was drunk, but he wasn’t. And since then, no one seems to have seen Brion alive.”
Le Picart frowned thoughtfully. “A notary may come to know financial secrets, after all.”
“True. Though family secrets are often more deadly.”
“So you don’t suspect this goldsmith?”
“He must be suspected, if it is true that he took Henri Brion forcibly out of the coffeehouse. But I can imagine no reason for him to have killed the girl. I cannot help but think that there is only one killer. Martine Mynette and Brion were both stabbed. Their lives were joined in family friendship as well as in the donation entre vifs transaction. For both to die on the same day is too much coincidence.”
“I agree. So who had reason to kill them both?”
“The most obvious answer is Henri Brion’s son, Gilles,” Charles said reluctantly. “His father was trying to force him into a marriage with the Mynette girl. And if he killed only the girl, his father would surely have tried to force him to court another heiress. But from the little I’ve seen of Gilles Brion, I simply cannot imagine him as a killer.”
“Anyone may be tempted to kill. And until we find the person who has been so tempted,” Le Picart said grimly, “the connections between the two victims mean that Brion’s death will be laid at our door along with Martine Mynette’s.”
They were both quiet under the weight of that certainty. The dim light through the small window’s greenish glass made the rector’s face look even more tired and drawn than it was.
The quiet was broken by a knock at the door. The rector gave permission to enter and a lay brother came in, holding out a folded piece of paper.
“This was left with the porter, mon père. For Père Damiot.” He handed the folded paper to Le Picart, bowed, clasped his hands against his apron skirt, and composed himself to wait.
“Please excuse me, Maître du Luc.” Le Picart opened the letter and scanned the page. Like the older religious orders, the Society of Jesus required that any letter sent to or written by a Jesuit be read by a superior. When he finished reading, he stared open-mouthed at the page in his hand. “Unbelievable,” he breathed. Still looking at the letter, he said to the lay brother, “Mon frère, bring Père Damiot to me, please.”
The brother bowed and went out.
“Well,” Le Picart said, looking up. He seemed more at a loss for words than Charles had ever seen him. “Well. This suggests that your initial impression of Gilles Brion may be correct, maître. But we must wait until Père Damiot has read this, since it is written to him.”
“Of course, mon père.”
“A goldsmith,” Le Picart murmured to himself, thoughtfully tapping a finger on the letter in his lap. “Very likely.”
Charles folded his hands tightly in his lap to keep himself from snatching the letter and devouring it.
“Mon père,” he said after a moment, both to take his mind off the letter and also because he needed to relieve his conscience, “after Monsieur La Reynie finished examining Brion’s body, he asked me to go with him to talk to the people at Procope’s. I went. I sat with him and drank coffee. I felt it was part of doing the task you’ve set me. But—well—it is a coffeehouse.”
The rector sighed. “Maître du Luc.” He sounded as though he were talking to a sixteen-year-old novice. “I am not aware that Rome has condemned coffee.” He smiled at Charles. “Rather the contrary, if gossip serves.”
“Oh, yes?” Charles was momentarily diverted by the thought of His Holiness in papal tiara, sipping coffee in some Roman Procope’s.
“You are pursuing these questions at my express order, maître. Where the questions take you, you will go. I charge you only to remember that Monsieur La Reynie pursues his own interests first and last.”
A flurry of knocking came at the door, and Père Damiot was inside almost before Le Picart could bid him enter. His thin, olive-skinned face was alight with curiosity.
“Yes, mon père? A letter for me?”
The rector waited serenely until Damiot remembered the required reverence to his superior. Then Charles rose and offered his chair to Damiot who, as a priest, was his superior.
“Bonjour, maître,” Damiot said hurriedly. “Thank you. With your permission, mon père?”
Le Picart nodded and Damiot sat. Charles’s mouth twitched. Damiot was looking at the letter in Le Picart’s hand the way Charles’s boyhood beagle had watched meat roasting in the kitchen fireplace.
“From your esteemed father, mon père,” the rector said, holding the letter out. “Read it here, please; it touches on what Maître du Luc and I were discussing.”
“Yes, mon père.” Damiot glanced at Charles and then was absorbed in reading. Fortunately, the letter was short. Incomprehensibly, before Damiot reached the end of it, he was laughing. Eyes dancing with mirth, he looked at Le Picart. “Incredible! Have you ever heard anything to match this, mon père?”
“Certainly nothing financial,” the rector said dryly. He turned to Charles, who was utterly at sea. “We will tell you shortly what is entertaining Père Damiot, maître, but first you need to know that his esteemed father is a merchant goldsmith and a member of the Six Corps.”
“I do know from Père Damiot that his father is a goldsmith, mon père—but, what is the Six Corps?”
Damiot looked at Charles in disbelief.
The rector said kindly, “The association of Paris’s six most influential guilds.”
“My father is head of the goldsmiths’ guild.” Damiot looked questioningly at Le Picart, who nodded at him to continue. “It is like this, maître. This morning, my father heard something that closely concerns Monsieur Henri Brion. He had already heard about the Mynette bequest coming to us—I think everyone in Paris has heard of it by now.” Damiot looked apologetically at Le Picart. “I hope I did not speak out of turn, mon père, but when my father visited me yesterday, he asked me if we had sure proof of Monsieur Simon Mynette’s intention, and I told him we had Simon Mynette’s letter, notarized by Monsieur Henri Brion.”
“Continue,” Le Picart said noncommittally.
“Well, now my father has written to me because he is worried that news that has just reached him about Monsieur Brion may somehow touch us—because of the Mynette property, you understand. Are you with me, Maître du Luc?”
“Barely.”
He leaned almost gleefully toward Charles. “What has come to light is a scheme for smuggling silver through customs. It was just uncovered at the port in Brest. This scheme has been traced to Paris, and rumor has it that our Monsieur Henri Brion is its creator.”
Le Picart lifted his hand slightly to pause Damiot. “What you do not know, Père Damiot, is that Henri Brion left Procope’s coffeehouse on Thursday evening with a goldsmith named Bizeul and another man. Those who saw him go say he didn’t go willingly. And this morning Henri Brion was found dead.”
“No!” Damiot looked incredulously from the rector to Charles. “Is this certain?”
Charles nodded. “I saw his body.”
“Well, I can easily imagine,” Damiot said, hastily crossing himself, “that Brion’s investors may have been tempted to kill him over losing so much money because this smuggling scheme has failed. But I know Monsieur Bizeul and I cannot imagine he would do murder.”
“Why not?” the rector said sharply.
“Many reasons, mon père. My father has known Monsieur Bizeul longer than I have been alive. And Monsieur Bizeul is a senior member of our bourgeois Congregation of the Sainte Vierge. As both my father’s son and the priest in charge of that Congregation, I have had many dealings with Bizeul. If he is not as upright and devout as I have supposed, I am badly deceived.” His face changed suddenly. “Though it is true that he recently dowered his last daughter very generously. Overgenerously, some said. Oh, dear.”
“Go back a little,” Charles said. “What is the role of investors in this scheme?”
“Ma foi! Do you understand nothing about money?”
“I’m noble, remember? We never understand anything about money. That’s why we don’t have any.”
A snort of laughter escaped Le Picart.
Damiot rolled his eyes. “You’re only minor nobility. Listen. Notaries are the middlemen in French investment schemes. We, unlike the English, have not seen fit to have a national bank, so notaries like Monsieur Brion bring together those who have money and those who need it. A notary has to know not only where money is, but who wants it and who will pay for it. And that includes things that can be turned into money, one way and another. Especially things like silver.”
“Which brings us to the details of Henri Brion’s scheme,” Le Picart said.
Damiot’s eyes were brimming with laughter. “So let me set the scene. The silver might not have been discovered, you know, Maître du Luc, except for the drunk. And the handcart, of course.”
Deadpan, Charles said back, “Ah, yes, it always is a drunk, isn’t it? The handcart, though, figures less often.” And waited to see how much of a comic script Damiot was going to make up right there in the rector’s office.
The rector shifted warningly in his chair.
“Yes, well,” Damiot said quickly, “it seems a drunk dock workman ran the wheel of his cart into the end of a barrel lying on its side on the dock. The barrel was one of fifty full of chocolate from Mexico. The barrel’s bottom split and chocolate seeds—beans, whatever you call them—spilled out. As the drunk tried to push them back in, he felt something hard in the barrel and pulled it out. It was a pretty little bar of silver, thickly wrapped in wool. All fifty barrels turned out to be salted with these small silver bars.”
“But wouldn’t the weight of the silver in the barrel give the whole thing away?” Charles said, frowning.
“That’s why the bars were so small. And there weren’t many of them, maybe a half dozen to each barrel. But a fifty-barrel shipment of chocolate would net you enough silver—on which you’d paid only the customs charge for chocolate—to make it worthwhile.”
“Reprehensible. I’m shocked.” Charles tried to stifle his grin. He might be from the south, but he was enough of a Frenchman to enjoy a story of tax evasion. “Henri Brion thought of this? That surprises me, after all I’ve heard of him.”
“My father says the customs people think he did. And that now Monsieur Henri Brion’s investors are out a great deal of money.”
“Because the investors financed the shipment,” Charles said, finally understanding.
“Habes,” Damiot said, classroom Latin for “you have it.” “And though what they would have paid Henri Brion for being allowed into the potential profit was far less than they would normally pay for silver, it was still too much to simply lose.”
“Not to mention facing prosecution for smuggling,” Le Picart said. “A substantial enough motive for murder, if Brion refused to give them their money back. Or if they feared he would try to lighten his own penalty by giving up their names to the authorities.”
So much, Charles thought, for his certainty that there was only one killer. “Does your father say if Monsieur La Reynie knows about this?”
Shaking his head, Damiot started to say something, but the rector, whose thoughts were going in other directions, forestalled him.
“Could this scheme of Henri Brion’s have given him—Brion, I mean—a reason to kill Martine Mynette? Could he have stolen money from her and used it to promote this smuggling? While her mother was ill, perhaps?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible. But it isn’t clear yet which of them died first.”
Damiot was looking from Charles to the rector and frowning. “The police are keeping us so well informed?”
Le Picart said, “For our own protection, we are following their efforts regarding both murders. You know that people are accusing us of involvement in Martine Mynette’s murder. People are going to say the same about Monsieur Brion’s murder, too, until the real killer is found. Have you not heard the song already in the streets? I heard it yesterday.”
Damiot shook his head. “I have not been out the last few days.”
“I have a copy,” Charles said, suddenly remembering. He brought out the broadsheet and handed it to Le Picart. “Still only the one verse, thank all the saints. A beggar was reading it to his confrères, but when he saw me, he dropped it and ran.”
Le Picart glanced at the sheet and passed it to Damiot.
Damiot read it and grimaced. “Not bad. Though I could do better,” He said it lightly, but his dark eyes were worried as he handed the paper back. “I wonder,” he said slowly, “whether my father could help us.”
The rector studied him. “How?”
“He knows all the rich merchants in the city. If Monsieur Brion found his investors by trawling The Six Corps, my father could probably find out whom he caught besides Monsieur Bizeul. Assuming he did catch Monsieur Bizeul, of course.”
“Yes, write to him,” Le Picart said. “Ask if he knows who the investors are. Casually, as though you are only curious.” He smiled slightly. “As though you are indulging in a little worldly gossip. I feel sure you could do that convincingly.”
“I can only try, mon père,” Damiot said modestly.
“Mon père,” Charles said to Le Picart, “Martine Mynette’s funeral is on Monday morning, at Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet. Madem
oiselle Isabel Brion has asked me to attend. It would be a good way to listen to what’s being said on the Place. It’s possible that someone in another house heard or saw whoever came to the Mynette house just before Martine was killed.”
The rector pursed his lips and shook his head. “I think your presence at the funeral would be too incendiary. Go, but wait outside for Mademoiselle Brion. When she comes out of the church, offer to escort her to her house. You can watch and listen as people leave the church and as you walk. I will tell the senior priest at Saint-Nicolas that you will be there—he is well disposed toward us and can speak a word from the pulpit to calm difficulties. And Maître du Luc, I want you to write a note to Lieutenant-Général La Reynie about Henri Brion’s silver scheme, on the chance that the news has not yet reached him. You do not need to show it to me, but have someone take it right away.”
Damiot’s eyebrows rose at Charles’s familiarity with the head of the police, but he asked no questions. “And I will write a message to my father as you ask, mon père,” he said, “before I immerse myself again in preparations for Monday’s classes.” He sighed. “Though I could recite the venerable Nouveaux Principes grammar textbook in my sleep.”
“Unfortunately, the goal is for your students to be able to recite it in their sleep,” Le Picart said, laughing. “You are excused, mon père. And you, too, maître. You must also have preparations to make. And so do I. I am still putting the final touches on our New Year’s Day celebration of King Louis’s recovery from his recent surgery.”
Charles groaned inwardly, having forgotten about the celebration since he wasn’t directly involved. Having a long list of grievances against the constantly lauded Louis XIV, he wondered if staying on the heels of the police could be made into an excuse for absenting himself.
But Damiot said enthusiastically, “I would be only too glad to write a little something for the occasion, mon père. Such a delicate assignment, considering the kind of surgery . . .”
Charles choked back laughter. The surgery had been for an anal fistula, and what Damiot could make of that did not bear thinking about, at least not in the rector’s presence.