Cezanne's Quarry (23 page)

If he had been a lesser man, Westerbury would have joined them, or at least cheered them on. But they were common criminals, thugs, and petty thieves. Not like him. They had done nothing to better their condition. They had never aspired to higher knowledge or a higher calling. Besides, he was innocent. Innocent of murder, at least. But, he buried his head in his hands as he suppressed a moan, not innocent of weakness, of not loving enough, nor of having let his poor, dear girl fall into the hands of a killer. Westerbury pulled himself up. Why play the stoic when her murder might go unavenged? Why stay here and suffer when he could be finding the monster and killing him with his own bare hands? A cleansing anger drove him to his feet. His sobs turned to rage, and he began pounding on the iron door with his fists. “I want to talk to Franc! I’ll give him what he wants!”

Miraculously, the slot slid open. Mealtime. “Wait, wait.” Westerbury grabbed his cup. He could not bear to lose his portion of the precious water. “Wait!” he shouted. He got back in time to push the tin cup under the ladle and to face the guard. “Tell Franc I will give him the note. Tell Franc I want to speak to the judge, but before I do, I will tell him where the note is. Tell him that I am ready to tell everything.”

The guard thrust a tin bowl through the slot. This time the substance was brown. Westerbury scooped it up. “Tell him.”

“Don’t worry. As soon as he comes in for duty tomorrow.” The opening was so small that Westerbury only saw half of the warden’s face. The mouth had widened into a crooked grin. “He’ll be glad to hear it. He knew you’d break.”

S
HOUTS AND LAUGHTER DREW
M
ARTIN TO
his window. The day was bright and sunny. It was a day that should have made almost anyone as gay and carefree as the three Picard girls. Protected by oversized white aprons that covered the plaids and stripes of their Sunday best, they were picking pears from the tree which dominated the little walled garden behind the house. The youngest, perched precariously on a ladder, was ignoring the warnings of her two older sisters as she reached into the high branches. Having the best view of Martin’s window, she caught a glimpse of him before he moved out of sight. She gasped, pointed toward his attic room, covered her mouth with her free hand, and set off another gale of laughter.

“M. Martin, we are getting pears to eat with your cheese!” she shouted, much to the chagrin of those below.

“Amélie, leave M. Martin alone. I am sure that he is studying or thinking about serious matters.”

Martin was not sure which of the older sisters had delivered this admonition, but he returned to the window, in the hope that no one had noticed his furtiveness, and gave what he hoped looked like a cheerful wave to all three of them. They seemed excited about the prospect of having dinner with him, while all he wanted to do was get through it as briefly and as gracefully as possible.

Martin stepped back into the darkness and sat down at his table to make one more attempt to comprehend the words dancing on the page before him. He had been going over his outline of the case for hours, but he could not vanquish the anxieties that had haunted him throughout the night and kept circling through his mind: he was incapable of finding the murderer of Solange Vernet and the boy. He might be persecuting an innocent man. The murderer might kill again because of Martin’s incompetence. There were so many holes. The identity of the boy. The missing letter. The note. The gloves. The source of Solange Vernet’s wealth, and so much more about her past that he did not know, so many details that did not make any sense.

Worse, he could not get Merckx out of his mind. What if he had not escaped? The gendarmes would find Merckx and discover that Martin had abetted a deserter. Martin might go to prison. All his hopes, as well as his mother’s, would end in shame and ignominy.
Good God
! Martin covered his face with his hands.
How did I get myself into this
?

The irony was that his most dangerous mistake was the one he would do all over again. Had it not been just to help his oldest friend, an exploited man of the people, escape from certain, torturous death?

Martin tugged at his beard and ran his fingers through his hair.
No more
! No more thinking. He had to prepare himself. The Picard dinner would be good place to start practicing concealment, something he would have to become an expert at.

He shoved his notes into the drawer, pushed his books against the wall on the shelf above his bed, and smoothed out the covers, in an attempt to hide every part of himself in case his landlord decided to come and fetch him. He left his copy of
Le Courrier d’Aix
in plain view. Having been forewarned by Picard, Martin had gotten up early to buy the local newspaper. The article had given a fairly accurate account of Solange Vernet’s murder and her circle, until it concluded with an unjustified polemic aimed straight at him. Martin picked up the newspaper and read the last paragraph again.

No one knows why Vernet went to the quarry where she met her tragic end. Unfortunately, the murderer struck just at a time when our prosecutor, Serge Lasserre, and many of the more seasoned magistrates are out of town enjoying the final week of the holidays. Thus it has been left to a young northerner, Bernard Martin, to carry out the investigation. So far, according to our sources, he has questioned only Westerbury himself. In our minds, he is a most unlikely suspect, but the forces of reaction, in the person of the church-going Martin, may want to take this opportunity to persecute the new ideas and their purveyors. We are hoping that the investigation will widen once the prosecutor returns to town. We cannot rest easy with a murderer in our midst.

Church-going? Martin thrust the paper aside. Had someone spotted him at the procession? Or did they label him as a believer simply because he had chosen to arrest a so-called promoter of science and progress? It didn’t matter. It was beginning. It was inevitable. This case would bring pressures from the left as well as the right.

As if on cue, he heard a knock. Martin took the three steps required to reach the door and opened it to find his landlord, smiling smugly, as if he were about to rub his hands together in delight and anticipation. Without being asked, Picard stepped into the room and walked over to Martin’s table.

“Ah, I see you have already read the
Courrier.
Well, I have something even more interesting downstairs. Can you join me for a talk before dinner?”

“Certainly. Give me a minute and I’ll be right down.”

They stood looking at one another, until Picard realized that he was supposed to leave.

“Yes, monsieur le juge, yes. I can hardly wait.”

As soon as Picard left, Martin dipped his hands in his washbasin and poured the water over his face in a vain attempt to wash away his weariness. As he wiped his face and hands with the towel hanging by his basin and tied his cravat, Martin rehearsed the system that he had devised for remembering the names of each of Picard’s brown-haired daughters. The eldest was Lucie, about twenty years old. The most
lucide
, reasonable and sensible of the lot. Bernadette, perhaps nineteen or so, had been named for the peasant girl who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. Undoubtedly this had been
Madame
Picard’s choice. Bernadette seemed to be the most
pious
of the sisters. The youngest was easy, eleven-year-old Amélie,
amiable
, as her name implied. She was plump and giggly, and so obviously the apple of her father’s eye. Martin smiled. Even he found her free-spiritedness amusing. The bustling matron, Mme Picard, was Marguerite, Martin recounted as he walked down the stairs. The cook was Hélène, the more-traveled cousin of Louïso, who was proud of the fact that she had once worked in a restaurant in Lyon. And M. Picard, if he once again insisted upon the intimacy of using their Christian names, was René. Martin was as ready as he’d ever be.

Apparently, so were the Picards. As soon as the door opened, Martin caught a whiff of the smoky scent of frying
lardons
, thick bits of bacon, coming from the kitchen at the other end of the hall. The hallway itself was overheated with cooking preparations and an overabundance of humanity. All three daughters were lined up to eye Martin as his landlord let him in. After the obligatory greetings, Picard shooed his daughters away. “Girls, girls, let the judge in the door. And do run along. Leave us men alone for a few minutes.”

“I thought that men only wanted to be alone to smoke
after
dinner.” Amélie was precocious—and emboldened because she knew she could never make her father angry.

“Today, my precious, we will talk
before
. Go on, now. Help your mother!” Picard gave Amélie a little pat on her well-covered behind, and sent his daughters off in a rustle of taffeta.

“Sorry,” Picard apologized, “they’re all a-twitter because of the murder.”

Just as Martin feared. Nonetheless, he managed a smile.

“Let’s go in here.” Picard led him into the parlor. “I have something to show you that you will find very interesting.”

Once Picard closed the door, the room was cooler and blessedly insulated from the smells that had set off sudden hunger pangs. Martin held his hand over his growling stomach. Oblivious to his plight, Picard led him to a small round table that held a decanter, two aperitif glasses, and a folded newspaper, which he thrust into Martin’s hands.

“Have you seen this?”

Martin read the masthead,
La Croix de Provence
, with a sinking heart. “No, but I have seen the northern version,
La Croix de Lille
.” It was his mother’s favorite newspaper, and during his last visit had been the starting point of religious and political discussions at the DuPont table.

“Well, then you know that it is run by the Assumptionists, the same priests that run all those sick people down to Lourdes.” Picard lowered his voice. “I had to make sure to bring this home with me last night or they would have never let me in the house. It’s got all the latest news on the National Pilgrimage. How many trainloads they managed to get down there. How many miracles, complete with heart-rending descriptions of every single cure.” He rolled his eyes to demonstrate what hogwash he thought it all was. “Women, you know.”

Martin certainly did know. If all had gone well, Marthe DuPont would be arriving home with her “poor sick ones” this very day. But why did Picard, presumably a liberal, bring the reactionary clerical paper into his home?

The notary grabbed the paper back and opened it up. “That’s not the most interesting thing in it. Not for us. They’ve got wind of you all over the region, my boy. Here.” He pointed to an article titled “The Hand of God” and left the Catholic newspaper in Martin’s unwilling hands. “Read it! And I’ll pour us some nice British port. You may need it.”

Martin settled slowly into the armchair while he began. The article was much less accurate than the one carried in the
Courrier
, and much more chilling.

The hand of God reached deep into the Bibémus quarry during the feast of the Virgin. While the pious women of Aix gathered to pay homage to Our Blessed Mother, a retired hatmaker, Solange Vernet, was being strangled in an isolated and deadly spot far from the holy celebration. Is it not striking that on the day marking the miracle of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary’s body into heaven, a worldly woman infested with ungodly ideas should be cast down into the deepest hole of our environs, prefiguring her descent into hell?

This was the tone Martin remembered so well from his last visit to Lille: righteous, arrogant, and wrong.

As is well known in Aix
, the article continued,
“Madame” Vernet was the paramour of George Westerbury, an Englishman who propagated the heresies of English science, spreading blasphemous lies about the origins of the world. These sinners even hosted a weekly “salon” to discuss their heretical ideas, in imitation of our foolish aristocratic ancestors, who opened their homes to the likes of Voltaire and Rousseau, and unwittingly brought Revolution and destruction on themselves. Fortunately the noblewomen of France have repented these sins and denounced the errors of the 18th century. True French noblewomen now bravely uphold Catholic and monarchical values against the braying of republicans and socialists. But Solange Vernet was no noblewoman. She was a Parisian import of indeterminate origin, who enticed the so-called “men of ideas” into her web, where she ensnared them in the deadly sin of overweening pride in their own weak intellects. Worse, Westerbury and his paramour were not content to limit their evil deeds to men of weak morals and intellectual pretensions. They rented a hall so that this
soi-disant
professor could give public lectures, propagating the lie that the earth is millions of years old. They offered “courses for ladies” in a shameless attempt to capture the souls of the wives, mothers, and daughters of Aix.

We do not know what drove Solange Vernet to the quarry, where no decent woman would wander alone. Was she searching for some proof of Westerbury’s blasphemies? Or was she going there to commit a sin of the flesh, so heinous and so secret that she had to hide it even from her lover? Let us not be ensnared into the trap of committing sins of the imagination. God Our Father sees all, knows all, and judges all. And He decided that this woman’s sins would not go unanswered on a day meant to celebrate the Most Immaculate of all Women.

Martin could feel his jaw clench, and his fingers tightened around the paper. Everything he was reading was to be expected. Yet it still felt like a violation. The next paragraph almost made him cry out.

We are proud to report, too, that despite the pleadings of Solange Vernet’s maid and the request of our Republican judiciary, the brothers of the Madeleine Church refused to bury the woman’s body in holy ground. The rest lies in the hands of the godless Republican courts. Most of the agents of the impious government are now away, indulging in their leisures. Only the young, inexperienced Parisian Bernard Martin remains to pursue the case. Is his soul pure enough to see through the lies and deceptions of Westerbury and the other “men of science”?