Cezanne's Quarry

by Barbara Corrado Pope

  This is what Martin told Franc as they huddled in the corridor out of the hearing of the family. The most compelling reason to hold Cézanne would be if they considered him to be dangerous. But to whom? They already had Westerbury in jail, and they’d send word to Arlette LaFarge not to let the artist into the Vernet apartment. Either because Westerbury was his favorite suspect, or because he did not want to tangle with a rich, important family, Franc was uncharacteristically amenable to the least drastic course of action. He promised to have one of his men keep an eye on Cézanne and agreed to release him.

  Martin watched the artist pause at the door of his chambers, contemplating the familial gauntlet. The mother and father were still huddled together on the bench. Across from them, standing by the railing, the two sisters and brother-in-law waited anxiously. Finally, Paul Cézanne put on his cap and went to his father, offering his arm. As he helped the old man to his feet, Conil stepped toward them. Martin heard Cézanne grumble, “We’ll talk later.” When the lawyer opened his mouth to say something, Cézanne repeated, “Later!” He pushed past his brother-in-law and, with his father leaning on him, led the silent procession down the stairs to their privileged exit through the main door. Cézanne held his head up high, just as Westerbury had done. Despite himself, Martin felt a little sorry for him, as he had for the Englishman.

  “Humph.” That was Franc’s reaction, as he stepped back into Martin’s office. He had no soft-hearted concern for the weak. And he was undoubtedly right. One should not waste pity on murder suspects.

  They agreed that Martin should spend the afternoon writing orders to get as many members of Solange Vernet’s salon as possible into his chambers the next day, and that Franc should continue to question Westerbury about the letter, the note, the weapon, and the gloves. Martin hoped that Franc would not be brutal, but he no longer gave a damn about the Englishman who had proved himself to be an accomplished liar.

  Before Franc left, Martin turned down the inspector’s invitation to join him at Chez l’Arlésienne for dinner. Instead, he sent Joseph out for sandwiches. Official work, at his desk, always put Martin on an even keel. It kept fatigue and discouragement at bay. Later he would go over again and again in his mind all that had transpired in the last few days. He would try to understand how the rage and pain in one throbbing human heart had led to two murders. What Martin had no way of knowing is how much his own heart would be tested that night.

  14

  “IT’S ME, BROTHER.”

  The only one who called Martin “brother” was his old schoolmate, Jean-Jacques Merckx.

  “Jean-Jacques?”

  A shadow emerged from the corner. “Yes, Jean-Jacques,” he answered in a tone heavy with sarcasm. He had caught the fear and hesitation in Martin’s voice.

  What else could Merckx expect? He had been Martin’s best friend, the only other scholarship student at Xavier. But ever since leaving school, his reappearances had brought trouble, demands that Martin could not possibly fulfill, yet could not refuse—demands for money, for help, for support and approval of his radical political activities. What would he want this time?

  “Let me have a look at you.” As Martin reached for the oil lamp on his table, Merckx edged away, toppling the chair and falling onto the bed.

  “Not by the window, and close the door.”

  After securing the latch and righting the chair, Martin held the light over his friend, who sat on the bed with his back against the wall. Merckx looked worse than ever. Thinner and dirtier. Even in childhood, his watery blue eyes had been rimmed with dark circles. Now they sank back into his head, duller and more distant. There was a smell, too, of sweat and desperation and, when Merckx began to snicker, an odor of sickness and neglect.

  He noticed Martin cringe. “A bad conscience always smells bad, don’t you think, Brother Bernard? And I am, as always, condemned to be your conscience.” His voice was as harsh and hectoring as ever.

  “What do you want?” Martin asked, the anger rising in him.

  “I need help.”

  Martin put the lamp on the table and sat down. This could be disastrous. His heart began to pound.

  “I thought you were in the army.” He barely got the words out.

  “I am . . . or was.”

  Merckx never asked for anything directly. He always wanted Martin to pull it out of him, to prove his friendship. Martin hated this game, but knew it was necessary. Every other boy at Xavier had ridiculed Merckx because of his ill-fitting clothes, his dirty corn-yellow hair, and his Flemish accent. Most of all, they had scorned him because he was the sickly progeny of the workers their own parents employed and exploited. They had given Martin a hard time too. But at least his relatives were “respectable.” So were his demeanor and attitudes—too respectable, according to Merckx, who never hesitated to point out the hypocrisies of the rich and pious.

  Merckx coughed, as if to signal that it was Martin’s turn to speak.

  “Are you on leave?” Hope against hope.

  “Don’t you wish, monsieur le juge.”

  Martin could hardly breathe. “You have deserted, then?” That was it. A lawbreaker, a traitor, in his own room. Martin rose above his companion, fists clenched. “What have you done?” He couldn’t take the pleading out of his voice, even though it might bring down a shower of scorn. Merckx knew that as an officer of the court it was his duty to report a desertion. Why had Merckx come here?

  “That’s why I need help.” Merckx had dropped the mocking tone. He knew full well what he was asking.

  “But you told me you could get through your service. You said you’d be among men like yourself. Peasants. Workers. People you could talk to.” Martin was glad he had not turned the lamp up high. Tears of frustration rushed to his eyes.

  Merckx spit on the floor. “With the officers on my neck all the time! You don’t know what it’s like. You got exempted because you were in law school and because you were mommy’s only son. But believe me, they’re no different from the Jesuits. Except they don’t only rap you on the knuckles when you’re insubordinate. Oh no. The great Republican army throws you in solitary. Or makes you stand at attention for hours at a time in the sun until you fall down, so they can kick you back up again. Until you can’t take it any more.” His voice rose with emotion.

  Martin put his hand to his mouth to signal quiet. The window was wide open.

  “How did you find me?”

  “I went to the Palais. I asked around. Everyone seems to know the young judge.”

  Martin sank down into the chair again. It was worse than he had feared.

  “Don’t worry, I was careful.”

  Martin stared out his window at the darkening sky. Merckx, careful? Merckx, who made it a point to insult Martin’s “bourgeois” friends, even his mother? Thank God the Proc and the other judges were out of town. He desperately wanted to know who Merckx had spoken to. If Martin were lucky, it might have been Old Joseph, who barely remembered his own name, and who had a certain loyalty to his “young judge.” But it more likely had been one of the gendarmes, whose loyalties were only to Franc.

  “I told you I was careful. No reason to worry. I told you.”

  Martin got up and ran his hands through his hair. Merckx had an uncanny ability to read his mind. Had he become that predictable, that bourgeois? He had always helped Merckx before. But this? Asking him to abet desertion? This. Martin started to pace.

  “Tell me what you want.”

  “Right now, the rest of your wine, while you consider whether or not you will step off your pedestal and come to the aid of an old friend.”

  Martin handed Merckx a half-empty bottle from his table and continued to circle the small space in front of the bed. What he really wanted was for Merckx to disappear, that he not be forced to make a choice between the law and his friend.

  Making choices and taking risks had always been a part of their friendship, from the very beginning when Merckx forced Martin into his one true act
of moral and physical courage. It had happened about a year after his father’s death, and it had bound them together forever. Jean-Jacques had once again challenged Father Campion’s lessons in morality. Called in front of the class for the usual punishment of three strokes, he refused to apologize. Perhaps worse, he refused to cry out. The rod came down on his hands again and again. Martin winced at the memory. He thought he had heard bones crack. And still Merckx stood there, silent, tears trailing white streaks down his perpetually dirty face.

  “Stop! Stop!” Martin had shouted. And when Father Campion persisted, he had run to the front of the room and grabbed the priest’s arm. “Stop!”

  This had earned Martin his first punishment of six strokes. He had tried to stay as silent as Merckx, and kept telling himself that he had done right, that he had brought the priest to his senses by diverting him away from the poor, incorrigible boy. Afterwards, as his mother tenderly salved his hands, she admonished him to listen to his superiors. He always wondered what his father would have said to him. Martin smiled to himself. What would Franc have said? Would he have given him a lecture on watching out for oneself, or admired Martin’s audacity?

  Merckx had said nothing, and he certainly had never thanked Martin. He would never recognize anyone else in that class as being as courageous as he. But he had befriended Martin and shown him an entirely new world: a world where whole families cooked, slept, and propagated in a single room in tottering wooden buildings; a world where merit was measured not by wealth, education, or piety, but by loyalty and solidarity—and by a distrust of the rich. What a different view Merckx had given him of the DuPonts. Merckx taught him that his benefactors made the money that funded their “charities” by exploiting women and children. His mother and sisters worked fourteen hours a day on DuPont’s loud, clanking, dusty looms, which never stopped for any reason. What Martin remembered most vividly is that in Merckx’s world everyone coughed. The women wheezed out the brown detritus of the woolen mills, while the men spat out the coal-black dirt of the mines. And Merckx himself, it seemed, had been born coughing. That’s why they let him go to school. They had ceded their weakest child to the bourgeoisie and the Church, in the hope that he might somehow survive.

  Now Merckx sat on Martin’s bed, doubled over, his hacking cough worse than ever. What did Martin really owe Merckx? His sense of justice? His vocation? If that were so, he had certainly never been able to live up to his friend’s standards. Merckx denounced him for going to law school, mocked his choice of the magistrature, and, during their last angry encounter in Paris, even berated him for “exploiting” a working-class girl, the ever-willing Honorine. If he hadn’t been so frightened, Martin might have enjoyed the irony of his situation. Maybe Merckx had become his conscience, a confessor more fearsome than anything the Church had ever produced.

  And maybe Merckx was the only thing keeping him from the complacency of a slow, predictable climb up the ladder in the civil service. Maybe Merckx was his one true friend.

  As he watched Merckx struggling to sit upright on the bed, Martin knew that he would never give him up. Merckx was everything, everyone that Martin hoped to protect in his chambers: the poor, the suffering, those who struggled merely to survive. Like Arlette, Martin thought, and like the boy he had seen this morning, who had unwittingly sacrificed his life for a pittance.

  As their eyes met, Martin spoke. “I can’t keep you here. The landlord and his family are returning tomorrow. If you decide to go back, I can help you.”

  “I can’t. Don’t you understand? They’ll send me to Devil’s Island this time.”

  They both knew what that meant. More beatings, and a slow, rotting death in the hot sun thousands of miles away from everything Merckx had ever known. There was really nothing else for Martin to do. He asked, “What do you need?”

  “Not much, just enough to keep on going.”

  “But where? You are in no condition—”

  “I’ve made it this far. When I get there, they’ll take care of me.”

  “Who?”

  “My real brothers.”

  Martin ignored the intended insult. If he were going to help Merckx, if he were going to keep them both out of trouble, he had to keep a cool head.

  “Where are you going, Jean-Jacques? Who are these people?”

  “If I can make it to Italy, I have contacts there who will help me get to Switzerland. I can stay with one of the Swiss workers in the movement, or with other exiles, Russians, Poles, Italians. Some are even training to be doctors so they can go back to their countries and serve the poor while they talk sense into them. Maybe I’ll do that, become a doctor. You’d like that, Bernard, wouldn’t you? You always told me to make something of myself. I’ll get a new identity card, sneak back in, and help my people.”

  Without knowing it, Martin had begun to shake his head in disbelief. He could not imagine Merckx living long enough to become a doctor. He could not even imagine how Merckx would complete his dangerous journey.

  “All right. So I won’t become a doctor. Maybe I’ll just sneak back in and bomb your Palais.”

  “Stop it! Stop this talk.” Of course Merckx would never demonstrate any sentimentality, even at the thought of his own demise. Only Martin was weak enough to do that. “You need to get away. All right. Maybe you can make a new life. Good. But I don’t need to hear about your crazy anarchist plots.”

  “Or what? You’ll turn me in?”

  “What do you need?” Martin punctuated each word. This was not a game.

  Merckx shrugged. “I have nothing, as always. I’m hungry, as always. I get cold at night, and I need something to lay my head on. And, yes, Bernard, I want to get away from here as much as you want to get rid of me. If you can’t help, I’ll just leave now.”

  “No.” Martin held up his hand. If Merckx had to go begging, both of them were doomed. “Stay back there.” He pointed toward the wall behind Merckx and turned the lamp higher. He shuttered the window, then opened the drawer of his table and pulled out the box that held the money he intended to send to his mother. He laid it on his table. It was enough to buy Merckx food and lodging for a week, if he was careful. Martin looked around. He had a bottle of wine on his bookshelf, but little else to offer his friend. He went to the armoire and took out his student jacket and a pair of boots.

  “Do you have something to carry these in?”

  “Yes, my sack.”

  “Good. But you still need food.”

  “Yes, I ate the piece of bread—” Merckx began coughing again.

  “But you’ll need something for tomorrow.”

  “Even tonight, brother.” Merckx smiled that old smile of complicity, reminiscent of the secret jokes they used to share against the rich and well-larded.

  “Yes, even tonight,” Martin echoed dryly. After all that had been said and implied, it was too late to fall back into old times, even if Merckx had suddenly become willing to do so. Besides, Martin had to act quickly. Where could he get food? Only restaurants would be open. He could not carry away a meal. Then he saw Clarie Falchetti in his mind’s eye. She was a bold girl. She would help a starving judge who, in the anxiety of solving an important case, had forgotten to eat his supper.

  Martin peeked through the white lace curtains into Chez l’Arlésienne to make sure that Franc was gone. The place was almost empty; the last customers were already pulling away from their table. The bell announcing his entrance jangled his nerves, but he pushed himself forward, toward the center of the restaurant. When Mme Choffrut spotted him, she clasped her hands together in delight and invited him to a table.

  Martin demurred. “I know it is late. I wouldn’t impose upon you to serve a meal at this time. I was just wondering. . . .” Suddenly his story seemed quite feeble.

  “Are you hungry?” she smiled.

  “I do need something. . . .”

  “And you’d like to see Clarie!” She almost clapped her hands.

  He had been counting on her desir
e to get Clarie and him together, but, confronted with her enthusiasm, felt ashamed of himself. Why was deceit so easy in his chambers and so difficult here?

  “Clarie! Clarie!” Mme Choffrut called, then made a show of going into the kitchen to leave them alone.

  As soon as Clarie saw Martin, she stopped and stood with her hands on her hips and her lips pursed in a questioning, lopsided grin. He had meant to play the role of the absent-minded, hungry judge, but he could not play the fool in front of this straightforward girl. He moved to the table that was farthest from the kitchen and sat down.

  When Clarie joined him, Martin explained that he had an unexpected visitor, an old school friend, who was in dire straits. They needed food for the night, but no one should know about the friend. This was the reason he had to carry something away. Martin took some francs out of his pocket and laid them on the table. “Anything portable.” He was taking a risk, but he somehow knew he could trust her with his secret. Before answering, Clarie stared at him, considering his request. Then she nodded and touched his arm. “I’ll think of something. And someday you will have to tell me more, yes?”

  Martin nodded, “Yes,” although he could not imagine telling anyone he was abetting a deserter.

  When Clarie returned from the kitchen, she handed him two loaves of bread and some pears and cheese wrapped in an old newspaper. Martin rose to receive them. Clarie took money from the table, counted out some for the Choffruts, and thrust the rest into the pocket of Martin’s coat.

  “There, that’s fair.”

  “Thank you.” Martin saw Mme Choffrut watching them from the kitchen, so he said no more.

  Clarie walked him to the door and, as the bell chimed, he turned to thank her again. Her only response was a look of concern.

  Saturday, August 22

  Up until now, science like law, made exclusively by men, has too often considered woman as an absolutely passive being, without instincts or passions or her own interests; as a purely plastic material capable of taking any form without resistance; a being without the inner resources to react against the education she receives or against the discipline to which she submits as part of law, custom or opinion. Woman is not made like this.