Pure (5 page)

There is no sound, nothing but the dull clacking of the keys, the clumping of the pedals. He has no air, though for Couperin it would take more than air – the old organ really isn’t up to it any more. For other pieces, less demanding on warped metal and old leather, he now and then hires a market porter to work the pump, or that big mute boy who hangs around on the rue Saint-Denis.
Then
les Innocents is driven almost mad, the brass eagles, the tattered banners, the million bones in the crypts, all of it forced back for a few minutes towards something like life. That is his job – there is no other reason to play: no congregation comes, no masses are said, no weddings celebrated, and certainly there are no funerals. But while he plays, and while the priest, that haggard old soldier of Christ, is allowed to haunt the place, then the Church retains an interest in les Innocents, one which, like interests anywhere, it may trade for hard advantage.

He is leaping octaves, modulating furiously, his very white fingers dancing across the keyboards in pursuit of Couperin’s fawn, when he hears – surely not! – the door in the north wall being opened. The priest, when he leaves the place at all, has other ways of coming and going, but if not Père Colbert, who?

He twists on the bench, squints down the aisle to where, in the open doorway to the rue aux Fers, a man is standing. A man, yes, a young man, but the organist, who knows most of the faces in the quarter, does not recognise him.

‘You need some assistance, monsieur?’

The intruder stops mid-stride. He turns his head, seeking the origin of the voice.

‘You see the pipes? Walk towards them. You will soon see me . . . A little more . . . A little more . . . There! A being of flesh and blood like yourself. I am Armand de Saint-Méard. Organist at the church of les Saints-Innocents.’

‘An organist? Here?’

‘Here is the organ. Here is the organist. There is really no cause for astonishment.’

‘I did not mean to . . .’

‘And you, monsieur? Whom do I have the honour of addressing?’

‘Baratte.’

‘Baratte?’

‘I am the engineer.’

‘Ah! You have come to mend the organ.’

‘Mend it?’

‘It limps, musically speaking. I do what I can, but . . .’

‘I regret, monsieur . . . I do not know organs.’

‘No? And yet it is the only machine we have. I would suggest that you have come to the wrong place except that I see you have a key in your hand. The bishop has sent you?’

‘The bishop? No.’

‘Then?’

In a quiet voice, and after a moment of hesitation, Jean-Baptiste speaks the minister’s name.

‘So they have something in mind for us at last,’ says the organist.

‘I am here to make a—’

‘Shhh!’

High above them, on the narrow gangway of the triforium, a noise of shuffling feet. The organist draws Jean-Baptiste to the shelter of a pillar. They wait. After a minute, the sound fades. ‘Père Colbert,’ whispers the organist. ‘Unlikely to look kindly on an engineer sent by the minister. Unlikely, really, to look kindly on anyone.’

‘A priest?’

‘Old but strong as an ox. A missionary in China before either of us was born. I have even heard he was tortured there. Did something to his eyes. The light pains him now. Wears tinted spectacles. Sees through a glass darkly. Murderous temper on him . . .’

Jean-Baptiste nods, and glancing at the red of the other’s hair, says, ‘It was you who lived at the Monnards’ house?’

‘The Monnards? And how would you, monsieur, know about such a thing?’

‘They still speak of you.’

‘
You
are there now? The little room above the cemetery?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are lodging there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, well. Ha! I’d say it was cold up there now.’

‘It is.’

‘A word of advice. When you lie in bed, look up at the ceiling. You will notice a small— Oh, oh. Careful my friend. You are unwell?’

It occurs to Jean-Baptiste, listening to the drumming of his heart, that since coming inside the church he has been trying not to breathe. He allows the organist to guide him to the organ bench, hears him, as though from the far side of a wall, say how he too, in the beginning, was similarly affected, how he could only enter the church with a cloth soaked in cologne pressed to his face.

‘I marvelled anyone could live within a half-day’s ride of the place. And yet you see, they do. Numerous as bees. You get used to it. Try to breathe through your mouth. The taste is easier to support than the smell.’

‘I am supposed to find Manetti,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘The grave-digger? You really are up to something. But don’t worry. Manetti is the easiest man to find in Paris. Let’s get you into the air. You can buy us both a glass of something restorative.’

Leaning – there is really no help for it – on the organist’s arm, Jean-Baptiste returns to the door in the north wall. Not that he can blame the church entirely. It was a disturbed night, the whole house restless as though a gale was blowing, though none was. He imagined he heard more scratching at the door, even, at some unearthly hour, scratching on the window. And then, in the early morning, Lafosse standing in the Monnards’ drawing room with the keys of les Innocents in his hand. No comfort to be found in
that
face . . .

When they are out in the street and the church door is closed and locked and Jean-Baptiste can trust his own feet again, his own strength, they turn left towards the rue de la Lingerie, then right towards the market. Every ten paces or so, the organist is greeted by someone, usually a woman. At each encounter, their eyes flicker over the young man beside him, the new companion.

‘Over there,’ says the organist, waving an arm, ‘you can eat well and cheaply. There on the corner, they’ll mend your clothes without stealing them. And that’s Gaudet’s place. Gives a good shave, knows everyone. And here . . . Here is the rue de la Fromagerie, where you come when you need to breathe in something other than the perfume of graves. Go ahead. Fill your lungs.’

They have entered one end of a curious clogged vein of a street, more alley than street, more gutter than alley. The top stories of the buildings tilt towards each other, just a narrow line of white sky between them. On both sides of the street, every second house is a shop and every shop sells cheese. Sometimes eggs, sometimes milk and butter, but always cheese. Cheese in the windows, cheese laid out on tables and handcarts, cheese piled on straw, cheese hanging on strings or floating in tubs of brine. Cheeses that must be sliced with a knife big enough to slaughter a bull, cheeses scooped with carved wooden spoons. Red, green, grey, pink, purest white. Jean-Baptiste has no idea what most of them are or where they have come from, but one he immediately recognises and his heart lifts as if he had caught sight of some dear old face from home. Pont-l’Evêque! Norman grass! Norman air!

‘Want to try some?’ asks the girl, but his interest has moved to the stall next door, where a woman in a red cloak is buying a little cake of goat’s cheese, the rind rolled in ashes.

‘
That
,’ says the organist, leaning across Jean-Baptiste’s shoulder, ‘is the Austrian. So called on account of her likeness to our beloved queen. And not just the blond hair. Hey, Héloïse! Meet my friend here, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, and who has come from God-knows-where to turn our lives upside down.’

She is counting out little coins for the cheese. She glances over, first at Armand, then at Jean-Baptiste. Does he blush? He thinks perhaps he has frowned at her. Then she looks away, takes her purchase, starts to move through the crowd.

‘The women here,’ says Armand, ‘despise her, in part because their husbands can buy her for an hour, but mostly because she doesn’t fit, doesn’t belong. If she was over in the Palais Royal, no one would blink an eye. You’ve seen the Palais, I suppose?’

‘I have heard of it. I have never—’

‘What a study you are, man! You are like one of Montesquieu’s Persians. I shall write about you in the newspaper. A weekly column.’ He strides ahead and, as they pass below the buttresses of Saint-Eustache, he launches into a loud, airy, impromptu lecture on the history of the Palais, how it was once the garden of Cardinal Richelieu and how the Duc d’Orléans had given it to his son, who filled it with cafés and theatres and shops, and how it was always crowded and unspeakably elegant and the biggest bordello in Europe . . .

He is still describing it when they come to the thing itself, one of its several entrances, a passage no wider than the rue de la Fromagerie, and through this they are jostled into an arcaded courtyard, in the middle of which a marionette show is coming to an end amid hoots of laughter. To Jean-Baptiste, it appears that the puppets are being made to fornicate. When he looks more closely, he sees that they are.

‘The police patrols never come here,’ says the organist. ‘The duke makes them little presents and they find something else to do. Lewd puppetry is the least of it.’

Who are these people? Do none of them have trades, occupations? Their movement, their costumes, the sheer noise of it, suggests carnival, and yet there is no obvious centre to any of it, no sense of structure. It is, seemingly, all spontaneous, the moment’s continual self-invention.

‘Come,’ says the organist, tugging at the elbow of Jean-Baptiste’s coat, urging him towards the door of a café halfway down one of the galleries. ‘We’ll try our luck in here.’

Inside is as crowded as outside, but the organist, with a well-aimed greeting to one of the waiters, is soon provided with a little table, a pair of battered cane chairs. He orders coffee, a bowl of sweet cream, two glasses of brandy. The clientele is exclusively male, mostly young. Everyone speaks at the top of his voice. Now and then someone reads aloud from a newspaper or raps on the window to draw the attention of a passing acquaintance, perhaps some woman he wishes to grin at. The waiters – small, concentrated men – navigate tightly winding paths between the backs of the chairs. An order is shouted, acknowledged with the barest nod. Two dogs leap at each other’s throats, are thrashed by their owners, caged under the tables again. Jean-Baptiste pulls off his coat (hard enough to do in such a space). The café is the warmest place he has been in for weeks. Hot, smoky, slightly damp. When his brandy arrives, he drinks it out of pure thirst.

‘Better?’ asks the organist. His glass is also empty. He orders two more. ‘You may call me Armand,’ he says. ‘Though I’ll leave it up to you.’

Now that they are sitting opposite each other, and now that he does indeed feel better, Jean-Baptiste can start to take him in, this Armand, especially as the organist has the restless habit of looking past him at all the other faces in the café. He wears no wig, nor is his hair powdered: powder in such hair would serve little purpose. His clothes – expensive-looking, though more so from a distance than close to – belong to no fashion Jean-Baptiste can recognise. Trousers, striped and worn tight as a second skin. A waistcoat half the length of his own, a coat with lapels so large the points extend almost past his shoulders. A cravat of green muslin, metres of it. When he drinks, he has to hold it clear of his mouth, his big, purplish lips.

‘You did not expect to find an organist at the church,’ says Armand, returning his gaze to Jean-Baptiste. ‘In fact I am the director of music.’

‘You have been there long?’

‘Eighteen months.’

‘Then you were appointed when the church was already closed.’

‘Can a church be closed like a baker’s shop?’

‘If the order is given, I suppose.’

‘You suppose, eh? Well, no doubt you are right. My predecessor drank himself to death. I dare say he found the situation . . . unsettling.’

‘And you do not?’

‘Positions, as perhaps you know yourself, are never easy to come by.’

‘But there is no one to play for.’

Armand shrugs, picks up his second brandy. ‘There’s myself, Père Colbert, God. Now you. Quite a good audience really.’

Jean-Baptiste grins. Though it troubles him that he is sitting in a café drinking brandy rather than making a survey of the cemetery, troubles him that he could barely breathe inside the church, he is not sorry to have discovered this flame-haired musician. And after all, he may learn something to the purpose. The work that has been entrusted to him will not be a simple matter of digging up bones and carting them away. He has understood that much. It will be the living as much as the dead he will have to contend with.

‘If I can stay in with the bishop,’ says Armand, ‘then one day I’ll get something better. Saint-Eustache, perhaps.’

‘Even there,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘you will be able to smell it.’

‘The cemetery? It is as I said. You get used to it. Which is to say you never really get used to it, but it becomes bearable. One adjusts. Tell me, what did you notice about the Monnards?’

‘That they are . . . respectable people?’

‘Oh, yes. Very respectable. And what else?’

‘That they like to talk?’

‘The only way to silence them would be to put a tax on words. Something our masters may be considering. But come now. Be open. What else?’