The Rhetoric of Death

by Judith Rock

  “What happened was, see, the king started building, wanted to fancy up the place. But in ’78, I think it was—around then, anyway—he tired of it. Turned his back on the whole thing and went off and built that Versailles. Just left all this. Which turned out a blessing, really, because a lot of people with no place to live moved into this side. Nice, some of it. Taverns, too. And there’s a well. Even a garden, some of the women have.”

  They reached the abandoned colonnade and Charles saw that the upper halves of the big windows in this south wall of the palace were glassless and boarded over. For warmth, he guessed. In a few places, the makeshift shutters on the lower part of the windows had been set aside to let in what light the morning offered, but oil lamps and candles flickered deep in the cavernous interior. Talk and laughter and arguing echoed as men and women went in and out. Ragged children raced along under the scaffolding, jumping up to hang from pieces of it and laughing uproariously when their rotten handholds broke. A huddle of barefoot women pushed past Charles, carrying hoes and baskets. Their eyes slid sideways at him and quickly away again.

  “In here,” the ex-soldier said.

  They went through a tall doorway without a door, into shadows thick with the smells of too many people in too little space. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Charles saw that there were partitions everywhere. These attempts at privacy counted for little, though, as his guide led him through room after makeshift room, one opening into the other. The first two smelled like chamber pots that hadn’t been emptied since King Louis left, and Charles’s shoes squelched unpleasantly on the floor. Then they crossed a cleaner room with most of a window to itself, where a hollow-cheeked young painter was re-creating Venus rising from the waves on the boards of his partition. In the room beyond Venus, a baby wailed. The ex-soldier beckoned Charles around the painter’s partition and then held up a hand.

  “Pierre’s is next,” he said, over the baby’s cries. “Wait here, I don’t want to surprise him, not the way he’s been acting.”

  He left Charles staring uneasily at the screaming infant lying in a nest of rags beside three women sitting on the dirty parquet, under a slice of the window they shared with the painter. Beside them was a mound of paper. Their jaws worked ceaselessly and, as Charles watched, mystified, two of them spit wads of something into a basket. Then they passed a jug back and forth—vinegary wine, by the smell of it—crumbled some paper from their pile, stuffed it into their mouths, and started chewing again. The youngest, chewing steadily, shoved aside her unlaced stays to put the crying baby to her breast.

  “Pardon me—um—mesdames,” Charles faltered, “but what are you doing?”

  The two older women gazed at him like cud-chewing cows. But the youngest reared her head and glared at him defiantly. Then it hit him. Papier-mâché. Chewed paper. The tatty little Temple of Rhetoric was partly made of it, and so were the heads, hands, and feet of marionettes, so were theatre masks. But he’d never seen it made. He turned at the sound of hurrying feet.

  “Come on!” The whites of the ex-soldier’s eyes were showing. “We have to get out of here, move!”

  “Why? Where’s Pierre?”

  “See for yourself, if you must! I’m having no more part of this!”

  He took to his heels. The papier-mâché chewers followed him with their eyes and then looked back at Charles, as though they were watching a show with puppets they’d helped to make. Charles looked around the partition into the painter’s room, in the direction his guide had gone, but the ex-soldier had already disappeared. The oblivious artist was still frowning from Venus to his palette.

  Charles went quickly back through the paper chewers’ den and into Pierre’s room. Pierre lay on the far side of it, on a straw pallet under the uncovered half of a window. His eyes bulged and his face was dark with congested blood. Charles turned in a slow circle, taking in the makeshift brazier, the single dented cooking pot on its side on the floor. He made the sign of the cross, prayed briefly for the violently dispatched soul, and knelt beside the pallet. And froze, staring at the deep, patterned line around the porter’s throat, a line that was the twin of the mark he’d seen on Philippe Douté’s neck. Charles pulled gently up on the porter’s arm. The body was already stiff. Lifting the thin blanket, he saw that the man was wearing only shirt and breeches and looked quickly around the room again. The old leather jerkin and cracked brown boots Pierre had worn yesterday were gone, along with his wooden carrying frame. A simple robbery, then? Not with that mark on his neck.

  “You do have a way of showing up in time for murder, Maître du Luc.”

  Charles leapt to his feet.

  “Account for your presence here,” Lieutenant-Général La Reynie said. “And if you are foolish enough to use that stave you’re holding under your cloak, you will no longer have a presence to account for.”

  Without taking his eyes off Charles, the lieutenant-général stepped through the partition’s opening. A thickset man, with a long, heavy pistol as well as a sword in his belt, came in behind La Reynie, eyeing Charles with happy anticipation. Charles dropped the piece of wood and held out his empty hands.

  “I am no threat, messieurs. And I know no more of this dead man than you do.”

  Probably a great deal less than they did, he thought, watching them ignore Pierre’s body as though it were old news.

  “I somehow doubt that.”

  “I might also ask what you are doing here, Lieutenant-Général La Reynie.”

  “Following you, Maître du Luc, what else?”

  The words hit Charles like a mailed fist. “I am a member of a religious house, monsieur,” he said furiously, “and you have no evidence whatever that I am involved in this! The body is already stiff, he must have been killed hours ago. I have been here only a matter of minutes.”

  “Yes, but you talked to him yesterday. And whether you spent all of last night on your hard Jesuit bed, I couldn’t say. By the time I learned about this body and put two men outside Louis le Grand, you could have been back inside the college. As for threatening me with your invisible little Jesuit tonsure, the king’s writ runs everywhere. The old days of immunity for clerics in Paris ended a dozen years ago. Though I get arguments about that,” La Reynie added sourly, waving his hand impatiently at the officer hovering beside Charles.

  The man grinned evilly. “Turn around.”

  Knowing that resistance would get him nowhere he wanted to go, Charles turned to the wall. Swiftly, expertly, and impertinently, the man searched him to the skin. He tossed Charles’s small purse of coins to La Reynie.

  La Reynie caught it. “Now go to the outside door and keep everyone out.”

  Charles turned around. La Reynie watched his officer out of sight and hefted the nearly flat purse in his hand.

  “Did you perhaps rob our friend here, Maître du Luc?”

  “Oh, yes,” Charles drawled, “there is so much wealth in this miserable stinkhole, I hardly knew where to begin.”

  “Pity. Then we are back where we started. Why are you here?”

  Charles forced himself to swallow his anger. “You know that Philippe Douté’s little brother was ridden down in the street. This poor soul saw the accident. I wanted to ask him about it, to satisfy the child’s father about what happened. That’s all.”

  La Reynie went to the pallet and looked down at the dead man. “Very interesting that this man was killed in the same way as Philippe.”

  Charles said nothing.

  “Pierre Foret,” La Reynie went on thoughtfully, watching Charles. “Quay porter. Sometime pickpocket. Nose smashed in a tavern brawl two years ago, so my sergeant who searched you tells me. Not a bad sort, Pierre, as his sort goes.” He suddenly tossed Charles the purse. “On your own admission, you were the last to see Philippe alive and—”

  “Except for his killer.”

  “—and you found his body. And now I find you here, standing over this man who was strangled in the same way as Philippe.”

/>   “Search me again.” Charles held his arms out at his sides. “I have nothing that would make that kind of mark.” He let his arms fall. “But that wouldn’t keep you from arresting me, would it? You and Louvois don’t need evidence. You destroy whom you please.”

  La Reynie’s brows drew together and his dark eyes flickered. Charles wondered fleetingly if there was a man behind that inscrutable face who minded being feared and hated.

  “Have I said that I am arresting you, Maître du Luc?” The police chief’s voice was smooth as syrup. “On the contrary, I am offering you a choice.”

  “What choice?”

  “My men can follow you, as they did yesterday. They can watch who comes and goes from Louis le Grand, as they watched you this morning. But I need a fly inside the college, someone to tell me everything there is to know from that vantage point about the murder and the ‘accident.’ What is being said. And not said. Who—if not you—is the favorite for the role of murderer.” He smiled blandly at Charles. “Your good rector is honest as far as his speech goes. But I fear he is telling me only what will not hurt his beloved college and the Society of Jesus. You are not going to have that luxury. There is your choice. Agree to get the information I need, or I will arrest you here and now, on suspicion of that murder and this one and take you to the Châtelet.”

  He paused courteously, his head on one side as though eager to answer any questions Charles might have. But Charles’s tongue was as frozen as the rest of him.

  “When we reach the Châtelet, I will summon the war minister. M. Louvois is a ruthless questioner, Maître du Luc. And why? Because his passion is not for morality, but for order. On the whole, a more deadly commitment, I often find. He has few qualms about destroying anyone who brings disorder to the realm. Common criminals, Huguenots, their sympathizers, their co-conspirators. It is all one to Monsieur Louvois. And when you have screamed out your confession of treason in Nîmes, I will use it. Against your college, your Society, and your family.”

  “Nîmes?” Charles just managed to get the word out.

  “Nîmes,” La Reynie said genially. “Drunken bishops are so often worth their weight in gold.”

  Charles closed his eyes and cursed silently. His dear cousin the bishop had never been able to hold his wine. But where in God’s name could La Reynie have seen him?

  “You didn’t know he visited Versailles?” La Reynie said, as though reading Charles’s mind. “It was before you came to Paris. Perhaps he was arranging for your new assignment. Or perhaps he was only reminding the king of his existence, since his appointment is still unconfirmed. Thanks to the pope taking his revenge for the church revenue quarrel by refusing to confirm Louis’s episcopal appointments. However that may be, Bishop du Luc grew very merry during an evening of court gambling and poured the whole story of the latest du Luc family scandal into the pretty little ear of one of my court flies. Who poured it into mine.”

  “Flies?”

  La Reynie laughed. “As in ‘fly on the wall.’ Oh, you will be in good company, I promise you. Indeed, you would be surprised at some of my flies. Where was I? Oh, yes. Bishop du Luc was sober enough not to name you, but it was easy enough to guess who his errant churchman cousin was when a du Luc turned up at Louis le Grand. I am aware that teaching assignments there do not normally go to unknown fledglings from the provinces. No matter how talented, of course.” He bowed ironically. “You should be very grateful to the bishop.” Every trace of amusement was suddenly gone from La Reynie’s face. “Choose, Maître du Luc.”

  Chapter 17

  La Reynie’s newest fly leaned on the Pont Neuf’s parapet, staring at the unlovely face of his cowardice. Refusing the lieutenant-général would have been his death warrant, whether sooner in the Châtelet or later in the Place de Grève or a Mediterranean galley. At least, thank every saint there was, Pernelle was out of La Reynie’s reach. Out of M. Louvois’s reach, too, and Louvois terrified Charles even more than La Reynie did. And refusing would have unleashed scandal and retribution on the Society, the college, and on the whole du Luc family. God knew, he didn’t want anyone else to suffer for what he’d done.

  Mostly, though, he didn’t want to die. Charles shuddered and closed his eyes, suddenly back at the siege of St. Omer. He heard the din of drums and trumpets and smelled the crazy battle energy, like the air before a storm. He heard the screams of men and horses, saw the blood gleaming on pikes and swords, heard the crack of muskets, and breathed the bitter smell of gunpowder. He’d been as full of battle lust as any man there, secure in the immortality of being eighteen. When the musket ball hit him, he’d thought at first that someone’s horse had kicked him. Then he’d seen the bright flower of blood blooming on the shoulder of his padded doublet. The certainty that he was going to die had wiped away his adolescent fantasy of noble death after thwarted love, and he’d thrown back his head and howled—not from the pain, but in grief for his unlived life. He had even less desire to die now.

  He opened his eyes and watched the sky shed its last thin veil of fog, watched hunting swallows skim the slow, olive green river, watched a pair of bargemen sprawled on their canvas-wrapped load passing a leather bottle back and forth, watched as though he were going to paint it all. The words of another ex-soldier rose from the depths of memory. “Let it make no difference to thee,” Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus had written, “whether thou art dying or doing something else.” With a mental salute to the old stoic, Charles straightened. Time to get on with the something else. With being La Reynie’s fly, which he wouldn’t be if he’d obeyed the rector’s order to leave Philippe’s murder and Antoine’s accident alone. But if he started obeying now, he’d die. La Reynie would see to that. If he kept on disobeying and the rector found out, he’d lose his vocation. Which he preferred to lose by choice, if he was going to lose it. But he wasn’t dying, not yet.

  He pushed off from the parapet, waved away a man selling cherries from his donkey’s panniers, and walked on. He squeezed around a sedan chair, set down beside the mackerel sellers while the lady inside chose her dinner, and hesitated at the end of the bridge. He’d reached the Pont Neuf from the quay, but cutting through the streets might be a faster way back to the college. Paris, like other towns, had no street signs, and he was too new to have a map in his head. But the sun was out now and the college lay to the southeast. How lost could he get?

  He set off along the busy street that continued from the Pont Neuf, beside the wall of the Grand Augustin monastery, looking for a southeast turning. As he walked, he set himself to go over everything he knew about the murders and Antoine’s injury. He wasn’t at all sure of La Reynie’s motives, not completely sure that finding the killer was what La Reynie really wanted. It had crossed his mind that La Reynie might be looking for something else inside the college, something Charles didn’t know about, and be using the search for the killer as an excuse. But finding the killer was what Charles wanted. That and surviving his indenture as a fly, with minimal betrayal to the Society and his vows. All of which was going to depend on concocting reports that were true as far as they went and went only as far as he wanted them to.

  Like an orator making his first point, he held up a thumb. One: The fact that La Reynie needed a spy in the college meant that what had happened was part of something that stretched from Paris into Louis le Grand. Or, of course, the other way around. His first finger went up. Two: According to the ex-soldier who’d taken him to the Louvre, the murdered porter had complained that someone was following him. But the man had been killed before he could tell Charles what he knew, so someone had been following both of them. Charles swallowed and looked over his shoulder, suddenly remembering the menacing gravel-voiced porter who’d stopped him from chasing Pierre. Had the man had his own reasons for trying to keep Pierre from talking to Charles?

  His middle finger sprang to attention. Three: The mark on the porter’s neck was like the mark on Philippe’s. Who knew how Philippe had died? The Louis le
Grand faculty and lay brothers. Probably most of the students by now. La Reynie and some of his men. And, no doubt, Louvois, which meant that all three persons of that unholy trinity—La Reynie, Louvois, and Guise—knew about the braided cord the murderer had used.

  Charles turned down a lane lined with old houses faced with stone and straightened his ring finger. Four: Guise was the only other person at the college—as far as Charles knew—who had talked to the street porter Pierre. But surely, Charles told himself, if Guise had followed him yesterday, he would have noticed. And he couldn’t imagine the fastidious Guise slinking through the beggars’ Louvre in the dead of night to murder poor Pierre. But there were the old stairs. If Guise watched his chance in the bakery, he could come and go from his rooms unseen whenever he pleased.

  Charles’s little finger jabbed the air. Five: Mme LeClerc had witnessed the accident, and had no qualms about talking, yet no one was trying to silence her. The thought of anyone trying to silence Mme LeClerc, however, made Charles laugh out loud, earning him a wary look from a woman with a basket of squawking chickens. So why had the porter been a danger, but not the baker’s wife?

  The little street dead-ended and Charles stopped, waiting for a clutch of Augustinian monks to pass on the cross street. He turned right and his left thumb stood up. Six: The dead porter, Antoine’s story of the note, and the old staircase were all connected, one way or another, to Guise.

  Charles’s thoughts suddenly jumped their logical track. Guise seemed not to know what Charles had done in Nîmes. Which must mean that La Reynie had not told him. Charles frowned, remembering how La Reynie had watched Louvois accuse him after the funeral, neither contradicting nor agreeing. And then La Reynie had kept Louvois from following him and Antoine. Puzzling over La Reynie, Charles turned east at the next street crossing. But that street curved north and took him nearly back to the river. He stopped, looked around, and held up his next finger. Seven: He was lost.