by Judith Rock
Charles stared at La Reynie. “You’ve talked to one of the men who seem to be the last who saw Brion alive. You know that they abducted and imprisoned him. You know that the second man has fled! So why in the name of all hell’s devils have you arrested Gilles Brion for that murder?”
“I don’t think those two men killed Brion. Oh, I have not stopped making absolutely sure of that. But I think that they abducted him because they were furious over the failure of his smuggling scheme and the money they lost. I imagine that they thought they could force him to pay them some part of it. Which is a very good reason to think they didn’t kill him. Dead, he would be able to pay them nothing. And I cannot see why they would follow and kill him after he escaped. He certainly would not have come to the police over his imprisonment; he was in far too much trouble himself. I agree that, of the two, Cantel has made himself far more suspect by disappearing. When I find him, he will find himself housed here until he explains himself to my satisfaction. But, again, why kill the man from whom you hope to get a large sum of money? So, until I know more, I am left with your devout friend upstairs.”
“If Gilles Brion wanted to kill his father, why would he do it at that noisome ditch where his father was found? How could he know his father would be there? Why would he be there?”
“I have no idea.”
“But you think he did it.”
“On the whole, no.”
Charles breathed slowly in and out, metaphorically clutching his temper with both hands. “Good. At least we agree about that. So what are you playing at?”
La Reynie rose from his chair, shaking his head in exasperation, and picked up the iron poker to stir the fire. “I am trying to shake loose from someone—him—anyone—what I need to know. Young Brion does not seem to me to have the stomach for killing either his father or the girl. But he is the only one we have clear evidence against, and I have to know for certain. The evidence against him in the girl’s murder is damning enough. If he killed either of them, though, I would say he’d be more likely to kill his father. Sons so often seem to be, don’t they, whether they really do or not.” His voice was suddenly bleak and his shoulders rose and fell in a soundless sigh. “But I agree with you that both time and place speak against his guilt where his father is concerned. I heard what he told you about where he was on Thursday night and early Friday—before he went to the Mynette house—and I heard the conclusion you drew from what he said.” He glanced over his shoulder at Charles. “This may shock you, maître, but if Gilles Brion did not kill his father—or the girl—I don’t care what else he was doing, whether he was with his ‘beau ami’ or the village goat or weeping the night through by himself in prayer. Though if you quote me, I will deny having said so.”
“Paris doesn’t have a village goat,” Charles said mildly.
La Reynie turned and stared at him.
“Now that we’ve shocked each other, what are you going to do to find out who really killed Martine Mynette and Henri Brion so you can let Gilles go?”
“I wish I knew.”
“I see. Well, you won’t be glad to know that I have leave from Père Le Picart to give you another problem to solve. Louis le Grand was attacked on Friday night.”
“What?”
“Yes, I thought perhaps you didn’t know. Which in itself is interesting. Three men broke several of our windows on the rue St. Jacques and scrawled the word murderers on our doors. Père Le Picart assumed that the University was behind it, since they take any opportunity to stir up anti-Jesuit feeling. But he told me the next day that he talked privately with the University’s rector—”
“And made a few threats of his own, I imagine,” La Reynie said appreciatively. And added less appreciatively, “Instead of informing the police.”
“As you say. He now thinks that it was not the University’s doing. Some students returning from a tavern to a University house watched the fun and broke our door down, but it seems their presence was pure chance. I think the attackers were tavern drunks, maybe from the Place Maubert, where I first heard the song accusing us of conniving at Mademoiselle Mynette’s death. Though, when I caught one man and talked to him, he wasn’t very drunk. And he wasn’t afraid, even when I threatened him with the police. At least, he wasn’t as afraid as he should have been. He was just angry.”
“Perhaps he was only exceptionally stupid.”
“Perhaps. But news of the incident has been oddly slow to come to your ears. I imagine that the University rector has muzzled the students who saw it happen. But why wouldn’t the men involved trumpet their exploit all over the quartier? Their confrères certainly wouldn’t turn them in.”
“Perhaps they did trumpet it, just not to me. If the man you caught wasn’t just a tavern drunk, who do you think he was?”
“He was dressed like an ordinary workman and talked like one. But—” Charles threw up his hands. “I don’t know. I suppose I’m seeing enemies everywhere. Perhaps he was a plotting Jansenist. Or a Gallican.” Charles grinned wryly. “Or a Jansenist Gallican.”
“Or perhaps he was a Gallican Jansenist,” La Reynie said, straight-faced. Jansenists, anti-Jesuit followers of a Dutchman called Jansenius, often seemed more straightlaced than Protestants. Gallicans were politicians who wanted no papal meddling in French government and sometimes allied themselves with Jansenists, since Jansenists were critical of the papacy. “I think, however, that we can leave France’s political circles out of this, maître,” La Reynie added.
“The hatred some people have for us frightens me, I admit. But, in spite of my fears, I have been given an order that directly affects you, Monsieur La Reynie.” Briefly, Charles explained what the rector had asked him to do.
La Reynie listened without comment. “Unfortunately,” he said, when Charles finished, “your rector is correct. I can use you. I have nothing like enough men to police Paris.” He eyed Charles. “And I do recall telling you once that if you tired of your Jesuit vocation, I could find a place for you.”
“You did.” Charles returned his look unwaveringly. “But as I told you then, I am Père Le Picart’s man, not yours.”
La Reynie inclined his head with elaborate courtesy. “And I tell you now that if you break the law in the course of what you have been ordered to do, I will not protect you from the consequences. Entendu?”
“Understood.”
The air between them crackled again with challenge, as it had in the corridor.
La Reynie glanced at the black-and-gold clock standing on a table against the wall. “Two things before we go our ways. First, I will see that the night watch pays more attention to Louis le Grand. Second, I have learned that your song is probably printed more or less under your nose. One of the vendors told me—after a little persuasion—that a stack of copies appears before dawn every day on the porch of St. Julien le Pauvre. Who puts them there, he doesn’t know. Probably some street child, and never the same one twice. The child probably picks them up late at night from a Left Bank printer and leaves them on the church porch. I will have someone watch through the night, but all that will happen is that the child will see the watcher and the copies will turn up in some other place.” The lieutenant-général rose to his feet and settled his coat skirts.
Charles rose, too, ready to take his leave. Instead, before he knew he was going to say it, he asked, “Who is Reine?”
La Reynie busied himself with pulling his wrist lace to hang straight below the wide cuffs of his coat. “She is Renée’s mother, among many other things.”
“I wondered,” Charles said. “Green eyes like theirs are not common.”
“Sometimes Reine is a revendeuse. But she cannot walk as far now, and old clothes are heavy to carry.” Paris was full of revendeuses , women who sold secondhand clothes, the lucky ones in small shops, the others as street vendors. “Most of the time now, she simply begs.” The lieutenant-général picked up his stick and faced Charles, who was also on his feet. His eyes were as cold as blac
k ice. “Hear me well. Never, for any reason—never, do you understand?—cause harm to Reine.”With a punctilious bow, and without another word, La Reynie walked out of the office.
Shaken, Charles found his way out into the cold air, which seemed a benison after the Châtelet’s grimness and La Reynie’s. The sky had cleared enough for the early sunset to splash streaks of orange down the western sky, and instead of taking the near way across the Pont au Change, Charles turned toward the sunset and set off along the Quay de la Megisserie, toward the Pont Neuf. The bells began to ring for Vespers. As a scholastic, he wasn’t yet required to say the daily office, but he knew most of it by heart and silently began the prayers.
“Oh, God, come to my assistance. Oh, Lord, make haste to help me . . .” Walking slowly, he reached the final “amen” with a deep sense of recovered peace, which shattered when he stepped on fresh, bloody cow guts and nearly slid into the Seine. Cawing laughter rang out behind him.
“Eh, Jean, did you see that? Praying and nearly drowned himself ! Priests. Pah! Surprised they let the soft-wits out on their own.”
Butchers working till the last light, Charles thought resignedly. He was glad—for once—of the cold, since it kept down the smell of the blood and entrails not yet disposed of in the river. Leaving the butcher stalls behind, Charles hurried toward the clatter of the Samaritaine pump. Working day and night in its little Dutch pump house at the Right Bank end of the Pont Neuf, it drew fresh drinking water from the river for the city. The color was nearly faded from the sky, and the lantern hanging on the elaborately gabled pump house was already lit. As he turned onto the bridge, a swarm of begging children appeared from nowhere and surrounded him, their small hands fluttering like birds as they patted his cloak, feeling for pockets or purse. Stricken that he had nothing to give them, he showed his empty hands and signed a cross over them.
“Come to the college of Louis le Grand on Friday,” he said, pointing across the river. “We will give you food and clothes.”
Their hands dropped and they stared at him with old eyes. Today was only Monday. One of them picked up a clod of frozen street filth and flung it at him, barely missing his face, and the whole flock ran back the way they’d come. Charles called out to them and then wrenched his cloak loose from his shoulders and ran after them.
“Here, take this, you can sell it, you can—”
But they were gone, expert, like all their kind, at vanishing. Charles slung his cloak around his shoulders, thinking how cold he’d grown without it even for a few moments, and how cold the children must be. Why? he demanded silently of God as he walked. This is Christendom. Our Catholic church is supposed to be reformed now—at least the Protestants have done us that much good, making us look at ourselves. So why do we let children live in the streets? The growing evening quiet of the street remained only quiet.
Most of the vendors in the small roofed stalls along the Pont Neuf were packing up their wares, but a few were still doing business by lantern light. At the weaponer’s, three swaggering, posturing men were trying out swords. Charles barely jumped aside in time to avoid a stumbling experimental thrust, as two of them sparred, laughing.
“Your opponent could have killed you while you were spitting me by mistake,” Charles said laconically to the man who’d nearly skewered him. “Keep track of where your real enemy is, or you’ll be too dead to laugh.”
The man’s eyes narrowed and he moved toward Charles, but his companions roared with laughter and held him back.
At the end of the bridge, Charles headed for the Fossés St. Germain, thinking to go back to Louis le Grand along the old walls’ embankment. Harsh voices behind him made him look over his shoulder and lengthen his stride. The men who’d been trying the swords were closing on him, not with any intent, it seemed, just arguing loudly about the virtues of Spanish steel. To escape their noise, he turned down a short street called Contrescarpe. To his relief, the men stopped, shouting into each other’s faces, and he left them behind.
A coach turned into Contrescarpe at the street’s other end, and he looked for a doorway to shelter in while it passed. But before the coach reached him, it turned right, through an archway, and disappeared. When Charles came to the archway, he saw that it led to an inn whose sign announced it as Le Cheval Blanc. The man begging at the arch held out a hand, and once again Charles had to say he had no coins to give. The White Horse was a rambling stone-built inn with three long-distance coaches standing in its busy yard. A group of beggars moved through the crowd of travelers as grooms changed the teams of horses. Bedraggled passengers clambered out of the newly arrived coach and new passengers boarded the other two. Long-distance coaches were more common now, though Charles himself had never used one. But he knew something from his soldiering days about the state of France’s winter roads, and he pitied the boarding passengers.
As he walked on, another coach turned into Contrescarpe and lumbered toward the inn. Charles scrambled for a door to press his back against. By the time the coach had passed him and rumbled into the innyard, he realized that the door he was leaning against led to a tavern and that inside, people were happily shouting, “Tu es riche? Tu es mort . . .” The street was slowly filling with early-winter dusk, and a frisson of fear ran down his spine. He walked quickly away, just as the tavern door burst open behind him. Forcing himself not to run, Charles held to his brisk walk, tilting his wide hat slightly and hitching his cassock up a little under his cloak to make him harder to identify from the back as a cleric.
For a dozen steps, he thought he was going to get away with it. Then someone yelled, “There he is, take him!” and feet pounded over the cobbles. Hands grabbed his cloak. He pulled its ties loose, left it to the grabbing hands, and ran. The street was filling with darkness and shouts of “vultures, deathbirds, killers!” A lumbering man with a massive belly came at him from the side and he dodged. But he tripped over uneven cobbles, went down, and someone else jumped on his back. Charles’s body, firmly convinced that alive and doing penance was preferable to dead and virtuous, took over. Flinging up an arm to block a kick to his head, he twisted half onto his side and smashed a fist into the face of the man who’d leaped on him. He scrambled to a crouch and set his back against a house wall. People were running toward him from the innyard, and the street was filling with people fighting each other. As Charles reached to arm himself with a loose cobble, someone swung a piece of wood at him. He ducked, kicking like a madman, and the attacker fell backward. Charles grabbed the piece of wood, swung it in a circle, and got his back against the wall again. A grinning man came at him from the side. Charles swung and the man went down, but the piece of wood hit the house wall, sending a numbing shock up his arms. Two women wrenched it away from him, shrieking with laughter, but other people grabbed them and pulled them back. Then light from the open tavern door glinted on steel and in the instant before the man with the knife lunged, Charles dropped to the ground, swung both legs from the hip, and scythed the man’s feet from under him. A deep voice thundered curses, someone swung a club at the man with the knife, and he lay still on the cobbles.
“Get up,” a pile of rags hissed at Charles. Past questions, he took the hand offered and stumbled to his feet. The pile of rags, also pulling someone along on its other side, hurried him to the end of the street and around the corner into a dark courtyard.
“Stay here!” the rags ordered the other person it had dragged to the courtyard, and turned to Charles. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” After nearly being stabbed, bruises hardly counted.
“They wanted to kill you.”
“Yes.” Charles finally recognized the voice. “It’s Reine, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“How—where did you come from? And the others?”
She jerked her head at the man beside her, whom Charles could see only dimly in the near dark. “We were begging at the inn. I saw you pass.” She paused and listened, her head on one side. “It’s quieting down,
the others will be coming. We have to be away from here. The man who came at you with the knife won’t be getting up again and—”
The half-seen man beside her banged his heavy walking stick on the ground and roared, “By holy Saint Michel, he won’t, the rotting son of a pig!”
It was the deep voice that had cursed so well in the street, and Charles recognized it now as the voice of the reliquary’s attacker and the almsgiving coat snatcher.
“—and because of that, we must be away before the guet comes,” Reine was saying fiercely. The guet was the nighttime police patrol.
A half dozen more beggars had drifted into the yard. Among them Charles spotted the old man’s young keeper, who hurried to his charge’s side. Reine started to lead them all away.
“Wait,” Charles said. “You’ve saved my life. Come to the college and I will feed you, all of you, it’s the least I can do.”
No one spoke or moved. The old man roared out, “Mary’s holy milk, of course we’ll go! And if it’s a trick, we’ll kill him.”
Chapter 15
“They can’t come in here.” Frère Tricot, the usually genial head cook in the lay brothers’ kitchen, was blocking the kitchen doorway with his bulk. Firelight danced across the tonsure age had given him as he shook his head at the beggars. “They’re verminous, see them scratching, even in the cold? You know how hard we work to keep the fleas down. Not to say the lice.”
“Bonsoir, Guillaume.” Reine moved into the light spilling from the doorway and stood beside Charles.
Tricot caught his breath and crossed himself. “Blessed Virgin,” he whispered. “I thought you were dead.”
“I’ve thought so myself, more than once. But never with you.” Her smile widened.
The brother scowled, scarlet-faced, and pursed his lips. “Wait there. Stand away from the door. You.” He pointed at Charles. “Come and help me.”
Keeping his questions behind his teeth, Charles followed him into the kitchen. A thick soup simmered in a three-legged iron cauldron standing in the fireplace. A few tallow candles burning in wall sconces showed strings of onions and braids of garlic hanging from the ceiling beams. Muttering unhappily under his breath, Tricot handed Charles a knife and a basket and nodded toward the loaves on a table in the center of the room.