Barely daring to breathe, Martin walked up to the counter and saw at once that there could be nothing innocuous about a book titled Nancy-Juif. Jewish Nancy. Or the Jews at the Border and the War of Tomorrow.
A spurt of heat shot up straight from Martin’s gut. He was sweating even more than before. Staring, mesmerized, he asked if he could take a look.
For the first time since their conversation began, the man looked suspicious.
“You’ve never told me your name.”
“Charpentier.” Martin thrust out his hand, hoping to God, for more than one reason, that his clerk had never been to the store. Hoping, too, that Charpentier would appreciate having been given a stellar role in this drama when Martin told him about it. Knowing that in this instant, it was the only name that he could come up with.
“Villiers,” the man said as he shook Martin’s hand.
Martin withdrew his hand as soon as he could, and the man pushed the book toward him.
“This should tell you everything. He talks about who let the Huns inside the gates during the war and who are aiding them now. Not just Dreyfus in Paris, but here, here in Nancy. It could happen again. The occupation. The humiliation. And now we know who’s responsible.”
“So it’s mostly about the war?” Once he had his hand on the book, Martin hoped not to let it go.
“Oh no, not just that. It names all the shopkeepers, all the officials. It’s as if,” Villiers’s eyes grew bright with pride, “as if we had our own Drumont, right here. Instead of Jewish France, he’s written Jewish Nancy. And we need to heed what he has to say.”
“Have you sold many of these?” Martin could not keep the trembling out of his voice. He bit his lip.
“No, because it’s still a work in progress. And look here,” Villiers grabbed the book from Martin and opened it to the title page, “printed in Commercy, probably because they control all the presses in our fair city.”
“May I?” Once more Martin held out his hand for the book, and when he got it, he began to flip through the folded, uncut pages. Even under the oppressively eager gaze of the book dealer, it didn’t take Martin long to realize that Nancy-Juif was everything Villiers had said it was: a Nancien version of Drumont, a prescription for hate, a call to action against the Jews. Martin turned back to the cover. There was no author’s name on the title page, only “a Lorrainer who has seen the war.”
“There’s no name here. Do you know who wrote it?” Martin asked, trying to keep his voice steady. By this time the sweat was sprouting all over his face. He kept telling himself, he had nothing to fear. What could the man do to him, even if he discovered that Martin was not who he said he was?
Fortunately, Villiers was too wrapped up in his enthusiasm to notice Martin’s anxiety. “Oh yes. I’ve met him only once. A priest. I expected that he would come in with the final copies some time this winter, but,” he shrugged.
“If he’s in Nancy, I’d love to hear him.” And wring his neck.
“Let’s see,” Villiers put on his pince-nez and took out a second copy of the book from underneath the counter. “I know he has a small parish way outside the city. That’s probably because what he has to say, his truth-telling, is too hot for the bishop.” This time it was he who gave Martin a wink. “The bigwigs in the Church are gettin’ too cozy with the Republic, don’t you think?” Without waiting for Martin’s answer, Villiers opened his copy of the book. “See here,” he pointed to the corner of the title page, “he signed mine.”
Abbé Hémonet, Noviant-aux-Prés.
Martin committed this scrap of information to his memory, then asked if he could purchase a copy.
“I only have three.” Villiers continued in a tone that was much too intimate for Martin’s liking, as if from one “little man” to another. “You can have it for five francs, if you promise to take good care of it.”
“I will, I can assure you,” Martin said. This, at least, was not a lie.
23
AS SOON AS MARTIN GOT to his chambers, he started to flip through Hémonet’s book. He didn’t take off his coat, he didn’t sit, he didn’t take the time to tear open the quarto pages. It was enough to see every page in eight to know that Nancy-Juif was a poisonous piece of propaganda. After he turned the book over to Charpentier to cut, he flung off his coat and jacket and loosened his cravat. It didn’t help. Nothing relieved the heat of anger and anxiety. Not even the arrival of Jacquette.
Martin crossed his arms and jiggled his foot impatiently while the inspector gave a desultory report on his meeting with the Widow Ullmann. In sum, nothing new. At least Martin had Nancy-Juif. After giving a full report of his excursion into the bookshops, Martin concluded: “I’ll read, you go find him.”
Instead of jumping to obey Martin’s curt command, Jacquette stood up and stared at him for a moment with a look of mock sorrow on his long face. “The priest really got to you, didn’t he? Should I take the army to fetch him?”
Martin threw his pen on the desk and looked up at his inspector. Leave it to Jacquette to find an irreverent way to point out obvious logistical problems. It might not be easy to retrieve Hémonet from some godforsaken town more than an hour’s ride away. After all, they had no idea how the villagers might react to a contingent of police from the city coming to arrest their pastor. Martin sighed and shook his head. “Right. How should we go about this?”
Jacquette placed both of his broad, callused hands on the desk. As he leaned forward, Martin caught a strong whiff of the Turkish tobacco that always enveloped the inspector. “Tell you what,” Jacquette said. “I’ll go by myself, if that’s what you want. Look over the scene. And then we can figure out what to do. If it’s easy, I might find a way to bring him back. If not,” Jacquette shrugged, “we’ll have to think about it.” After straightening up, Jacquette reached across his chest and drew a Blue Jockey from his vest pocket. “Noviant-aux-Prés,” he murmured as he patted his pockets, looking for a match. “You can be sure the bishop doesn’t like this guy, or he wouldn’t be out there in the middle of nowhere. At least that means we shouldn’t have any trouble on that front.”
This was the first reassuring opinion that Jacquette had delivered all day.
But what Jacquette gave, he immediately took away. “Of course, if the Monsignor does squawk,” he continued with the satisfied sigh that always followed his first pull of tobacco, “you’ll have to handle it.” His closed-mouth smile did little to conceal his delight at the thought. “I don’t think the Monsignor would deign to see anyone lower than a judge.”
Martin snorted. It was enough to know the formidable Monsignor Turinaz by reputation. The last thing he needed was to confront the powerful bishop about one of his priests. “Charpentier, are you done with the book?” Martin said, once again redirecting his impatience at his clerk. His greffier had been cutting the pages of Nancy-Juif with his usual finicky precision while Jacquette and Martin talked, and undoubtedly taking in every word they said.
“And how did you feel about the judge using your name, heh, Charpentier?” Jacquette’s annoying jocularity had not abated. There was no better proof of that than his addressing, with collegial familiarity, a man whom he usually referred to as an over-educated dandy.
Charpentier stood up as if at attention, his coupe-papier hanging from his hand like a sword at his side. “As Monsieur le juge chooses, if it helps with the case. I will certainly know never to go there myself!”
Martin heard a touch of pride in Charpentier’s high-pitched voice. The truth is that he had been pleased that Martin had used his name, for it was the closest the young man had ever come to being treated like more than a clerk. And now, even the sardonic, usually dismissive Jacquette was speaking to him.
“Good boy!” Jacquette nodded. “All for the cause, no? Let me have a look at that book,” he said as he strode over to the clerk’s desk.
Martin scratched his beard in frustration as Jacquette, still in inexplicably good humor, took an orator’s po
sition in front of him and turned to the first page of Nancy-Juif. He held the book at arm’s length as he declaimed the first lines. “LORRAINERS! FRENCHMEN! The past leads to the future. What two Jews of Nancy did a hundred years ago, what five hundred Jews did again twenty-two years ago, fifteen thousand Jews in Nancy will surely do tomorrow!”
Martin knew the page practically by heart, knew that the priest intended to show how the Jews were responsible for the Revolution, for the humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians, and God knows what treacheries in the future. He watched as Jacquette mouthed the last words of the introduction to himself. “Get rid of those who hate Christians. Get rid of the successors of Judas. Get rid of the Jews.”
Jacquette clicked his tongue as he winked. “He’s a bad one, all right.”
Martin held out his hand. He had had enough of the inspector’s high spirits.
Jacquette relinquished the book and took a long draw from his cigarette, exhaling very slowly. He had suddenly turned serious. “Sir, sir,” he whispered almost in a pleading voice, “you can’t, we can’t, catch them all. We can’t bring in every person who shouts ‘dirty Jew’ to someone passing in the street. Or everyone who feels they’ve been cheated by an Israelite. Or every politician who thinks a little anti-Semitism will win them a seat in the Chamber of Deputies. We can’t. All we can do is find one murderer in the best way we know how.”
Suddenly, Jacquette’s dark brown eyes turned soft with loyalty, and Martin knew why his inspector had made so many feeble attempts at levity. He wasn’t just trying to warn Martin about Hémonet, or the possible uprising of devoted villagers, or the flabbiness of Martin’s investigative plans. Jacquette was worried about him, Martin. They both knew that the cloud he was under was much thicker than the fog of Turkish smoke that wafted between them. Invisible, yet impenetrable. A potent mix of exhaustion and sadness.
Through the most seemingly futile and endless investigations, Martin and Jacquette had always been easy with each other. That’s the way they worked. That’s the way they succeeded. But this time Martin could not go along with Jacquette’s attempt at cynical humor. His heart was too heavy. The stakes were too high. He was under pressure at home and in the courthouse, from Didier, from Singer, from the press. Yes, he knew he could not root out prejudice against the Israelites, especially now that he realized how widespread and deep it was. How apparent and yet how hidden. Even from himself, even—and this was so humiliating he would admit it to no one—in himself. Only he knew that finding the killer was his silent act of contrition.
“But, of course you understand,” he insisted in an even voice as he tapped on the beige paper cover of Hémonet’s book, “this one is certainly worth catching and dragging in.”
“Of course.” Jacquette knew when to back down. And he certainly was not going to express his concerns about his superior in front of Charpentier.
“In a few hours, then,” Martin stood up. He hoped that the firm, lingering grip of his handshake would show his appreciation for what Jacquette had tried to do. The inspector met Martin’s eyes, nodded, and, without another word, set out for Noviant-aux-Prés.
As soon as Jacquette left, Martin took out two sheets of paper. One he labeled “names,” the other he left blank, to jot down any questions that arose as he read, questions to throw at Hémonet when he finally got him in his chambers. His fingers trembled a little as he opened the newly cut pages. He was not afraid to confront the usual charges against the Israelites: that they still practiced blood ritual; that they planned to take over the world through the machinations of the Rothschilds; that their Talmud taught them to despise Christians. These were the kinds of slanders that Martin had become all too familiar with in the last few weeks. No, what made him hopeful and fearful at the same time was that Hémonet would single out particular Israelites in Nancy, men and women who fell under Martin’s jurisdiction and protection.
Martin skimmed through the early sections on the Middle Ages, the Revolution and the Prussian War. They demonstrated only too well how deeply the priest hated the Jews and how willing he was to blame them for every ill that had befallen the natives of Lorraine from time immemorial—plague, the Terror, betrayal, impoverishment, defeat, corruption, starvation. Well and good, Martin thought, his anger rising as he skimmed the pages. Let him bleat about the past. Most of the men the priest had named were probably dead anyway.
What concerned Martin was the present. Here the accusations were more scattershot, and more lethal. Martin’s stomach began to churn as he read Hémonet’s description of present-day Nancy. The priest described the city as a “little Jerusalem” infested by a steady influx of eastern and northern Jews who would someday, once again, betray Lorraine to the Germans. It was a ridiculous claim. Martin had never felt surrounded by Israelites. Before this investigation, he had never thought about how many shops were owned by Jews or taken note of which poor immigrants in the city were of the Mosaic faith. Now he was ever alert to the presence of men like the tinker, whom Singer had reviled, and the long-coated, black-clad mourners bowing and swaying at Erlanger’s gravesite. Harmless types. He shook his head. The priest was raving. Yet after the murder of two Israelites, Martin could no longer dismiss Nancy-Juif as one man’s madness. The book was dangerous. It filled him with disgust, but he had to read on. For clues. For collaborators. For potential victims. For some connection with Ullmann and Erlanger.
It came on page 117. A “true” story about a poor woman begging in the wealthy Place Saint-Jean in the bitter winter of 1892. She had made the mistake of knocking on the door of a mansion inhabited by a Jew. She was rudely rebuffed and sent back into the cold with nothing to eat.
Martin lifted his head and thought for a moment. “Charpentier!”
“Yes, Monsieur le juge.” The clerk had been sitting quietly, fussing with whatever he found to fuss with.
“Can you go through Jacquette’s report and tell me where Daniel Erlanger lived?”
“The Place Saint-Jean,” Charpentier said, as though it were obvious. He prided himself on his memory for details.
“That’s what I thought, “Martin mumbled as he circled the paragraph with his pen and bent down the corner of the page.
Fortified by having found one possible piece of tangible evidence, Martin took in a breath and plunged back into Nancy Juif’s vicious stew of hatred and paranoia. By now it was clear that the Israelites as human beings had no place in its roiling pot. Martin had already observed that the priest never once granted them the dignity of calling them Israelites. To him they were Jews or youtres, the “descendants of Judas,” “the devil you can see,” subhumans dangerous whether outside of society eager to get in, or, worse, inside. In one particularly nauseating passage Hémonet even suggested that they be treated as pigs had been in the middle ages, as too filthy to be allowed within the city gates. Or, in another nasty formulation, compared them to the wasps who swarm into hives so that they can “kill the bees, tear open their stomachs and suck the honey out of their entrails.”
Pretty writing, this, Martin thought sarcastically. And all the more dangerous because Hémonet occasionally gave names to the pigs and wasps he claimed were “judaizing” the city. Martin’s head was beginning to pound. There were enough factual details and real names salted into Hémonet’s steady diet of slanders to convince the weak-minded. The priest named cafés where Jews supposedly conspired, listed stores and their owners on the main streets of the city, pointed a finger at a few prominent politicians, factory owners and jurists. Martin noted and read over these lists carefully to make sure that the Steins and the Singers were not on them. But then again, neither were Ullmann and Erlanger.
Martin shook his head in disbelief at the most preposterous claims. Jews spaced their houses throughout the city in such a way as to be able to take over Nancy when the time came. Richer Jews paid their poor, immigrant co-religionists to spy and report back to them. By the time he finished, Martin understood what it meant to hate an
entire race. He thought of the Singers, of the Steins, of the Widow Ullmann and the rabbi. All of them, rich or poor, male or female, young or old, were the same to men like Hémonet: Jews, lepers to be stigmatized and cast out.
“In the past,” the priest concluded, “lepers were kept away from populated areas and lived in huts or leper hospitals far away from cities and villages…. They wore mandatory uniforms, known to all. If ever they were about to encounter someone, they had to warn them by ringing a little bell that they wore hanging from their necks…. The Jews are the lepers, the contagious of our society….”
Oh, yes, Martin thought as he slapped the book shut, I am eager to talk to this priest. Eager to know everything about him. How often he comes into the city. How he finds the time away from his “investigations” to say mass, hear confession, comfort the sick, and console the dying. And what in hell he thinks he’s doing. Martin shot out of the chair and began to pace; he stoked the fire in the grinning potbellied stove even though he did not need the warmth. In his need to move and clear out his head, he did not even care that Charpentier was watching him under lowered eyes. Finally, Martin was able to sit again and begin to formulate the questions that he intended to ask the Abbé from Noviant-aux-Prés.
Night had already fallen by the time that Jacquette returned to report that François Hémonet had been defrocked. “About a year ago. The vicar they left in charge seemed quite cowed. I guess the bishop has quite a temper and doesn’t like insubordination. Whatever that means.”
“Do we know where Hémonet is?” Martin asked, alarmed.
“Would you believe it?” Jacquette chortled. “Sent to his family, like a schoolboy. If he did what he was told, we should be able to pick him up tomorrow, in Laneuveville. I’ll have two men and a carriage ready by eight o’clock. Want to come along for the ride?”
“Yes!” Martin wanted to lay his hands on the priest as soon as possible, although he was still taken aback by the unexpected turn of events.
The Blood of Lorraine Page 19