Quicksilver (73 page)

A dog ran down the bridge trying to escape from a length of chain that had been tied to its tail. Jack strolled to the other side of the river, shrugging off innumerable mountebanks, beggars, and prostitutes. Turning around, he was able to look downstream and across the river toward the Louvre, where the King had lived until Versailles had gotten finished. In the garden of Tuileries, which was now falling into the long shadow of the city’s western wall, trees, planted in neat rows, were being tortured and racked by the King’s gardeners for any deviation from correct form.

Jack was leaning back against a stone wall that had been warmed by the sun, when he heard a faint rustling just behind his head. Turning around, he saw the impression of a small creature,
crushed flat, and suspended in the rock—a common enough sight in this type of stone, and known to be a trick of Nature, as when animals were born joined at the hip, or with limbs growing out of the wrong places. The Doctor had another theory: that these had been living beings, trapped and immobilized, imprisoned forever. Now with the weight of all the stone in Paris seeming to press down on him, Jack believed it. He heard that faint rustle again, and scanning the wall carefully, finally saw movement there: between a couple of old scallop-shells and fish-bones, he saw a small human figure, half trapped in the stone, and struggling to get out of it. Peering carefully at this creature, no larger than his little finger, he saw that it was Eliza.

Jack turned away and walked back across the Pont-Neuf toward his entresol in the Marais. He tried to stare only at the stone paving-blocks below his feet, but sometimes there were moving creatures trapped in them, too. So he would look up and see peddlers selling human heads—then avert his gaze into the bright sky and see an angel with a flaming sword, like a kienspan, bearing down on the city—then he’d try to concentrate instead on the carved gods’ heads that adorned the Pont-Neuf, and they would come alive, and cry out to him for release from this gibbet of stone.

Jack was finally going mad, and it was a small comfort to know that he’d picked the right city for it.

WINTER OF
1684–1685

T
HE
A
RMENIANS LIVING ABOVE THE
wig-maker and below Jack did not appear to have any intermediate settings between killing strangers and adopting them into the family. As Jack had come recommended by St.-George, and had further established his
bona fides
by bargaining shrewdly with Christopher over coffee, they could not very well kill him—so: Jack became the thirteenth of thirteen brothers. Albeit something of an estranged, idiot half-brother, who lived in the entresol, came and went at odd times and
in odd ways, and did not speak the language. But this did not trouble the matriarch, Madame Esphahnian.
Nothing
troubled her, except for suggestions that anything was troubling her, or
could theoretically
trouble her—if you suggested that anything was troubling her, she would look taken aback, and remind you that she had borne and raised twelve sons—so what, again, was the difficulty? Christopher and the others had learned simply not to bother her. Jack, likewise, quickly got into the habit of entering and leaving his shack via roof-tops so that he would not have to say good-bye to Madame Esphahnian when he left, and hello when he returned. She spoke no English, of course, and just enough French to enable Jack to impregnate her mind with colorful, grotesque misunderstandings whenever he tried to say
anything.

His stay in Paris was typical of his wanderings: the first day was a great event, but next thing he knew it was a month later, then two months. By the time he thought seriously about leaving, it was not a good time of year to travel northwards. The streets had become even more crowded, now with an influx of hairy firewood-sellers, from parts of France where being torn apart by wild beasts was still a major cause of mortality. The wood-sellers knocked people down like bowling-pins, and were a danger to everyone, especially when they were fighting with each other. The garret-dwellers across the street from Jack began selling themselves as galley-slaves, just to get warm.

The strange visions that had made Jack’s first day in Paris so memorable, went away after he had gotten a night’s sleep, and usually did not come back unless he got very tired, or drunk. Lying in his hammock and peering across at the garret, he had reason, every day, to thank St.-George for having put him up in a place that did not have so many outbreaks of typhus, sudden raids by the Lieutenant of Police, stillborn babies, and other annoyances: he saw young women—runaway servants—showing up one day only to be dragged out the next, and (he assumed) taken to the city gates to be cropped, whipped, and spat out into the countryside. Either that, or else some private arrangement would be made, and then Jack would be subjected to the sounds and (depending on wind) aromas of some police inspector satisfying himself carnally, in a way no longer attainable to Jack.

He put the ostrich plumes up for sale, and went about it in his favorite way: getting someone else to do it. After he’d been hanging around for a fortnight, and showed no signs of getting ready to leave, Artan (oldest of the Esphahnian brothers who was actually resident there at the time) inquired as to what Jack intended to
do
,
actually, in Paris—making it clear that if the answer was “cat-burglary” or “serial rape” the Esphahnians would not think any the less of him—they just needed to
know.
To demonstrate this open-mindedness, Artan brought Jack up to date on the family saga.

It seemed that Jack, here, had blundered into the fourth or fifth act of a drama—neither a comedy nor a tragedy, but a history—that had begun when Monsieur Esphahnian
père
had sailed the first ship of coffee,
ever,
into Marseille in 1644. It was worth a lot of money. The larger Esphahnian family, which was headquartered in Persia, had plowed a lot of their India trading profits into buying this boat-load of beans in Mocha and getting it up the Red Sea and the Nile to Alexandria and thence to France. Anyway—Pa Esphahnian sold the beans, realized a handsome profit, but
realized
it in
reals
—Spanish money—pieces of eight. Why? Because there was an extreme currency shortage in France and he couldn’t have taken payment in French money if he’d wanted to—there
was
none. And why was that? Because (and here it was necessary to imagine an Armenian pounding himself on the head with both hands—
imbécile!
) the Spanish mines in Mexico were producing ludicrous amounts of silver—

“Yeah, I know about this,” Jack said, but Artan could not be stopped: there were
piles
of silver lying on the ground in Porto Belo, he insisted—consequently its value, compared to that of gold, was plunging—so in Spain (where they used silver money) there was inflation, because it was not worth as much as it
had
been, whereas in France all gold coins were being hoarded, because gold was expected to be worth more in the future. So now Monsieur Esphahnian had lots of rapidly depreciating silver. He should have sailed to the Levant where silver was always in demand, but he didn’t. Instead he sailed for Amsterdam expecting to make some kind of unspecified, brilliant commodities deal that would more than recoup his exchange-rate losses. But (as luck would have it) his ship ran aground, and he got his nuts caught in the mangle of the Thirty Years’ War. Sweden happened to be just in the act of conquering Holland when Monsieur Esphahnian’s ship eased up onto the sandbank and stopped moving; and, to make a long story short, the Esphahnian dynastic fortune was last seen northbound, strapped to the ass of a Swedish pack-horse.

This, by the way, was all first-act material—
before
the first act, really—if it were a play, it would
open
with the young Monsieur Esphahnian, huddled in the beached wreckage of a ship, spewing
expository pentameter, gazing miserably off into the audience as he pretended to watch the Swedish column dwindle into the distance.

The upshot, anyway, was that Monsieur Esphahnian, at that point, fell from the graces of his own family. He somehow made his way back to Marseille, collected Madame Esphahnian and her (already!) three sons, and perhaps a daughter or two (daughters tended to be shipped east at puberty), and, in time, drifted as far as Paris (end of Act I), where, ever since, they’d all been trying to work their way off the shit list of the rest of the family in Isfahan. Primarily they did this by retailing coffee, but they would move just about anything—

“Ostrich plumes?” Jack blurted, not really trusting himself to be devious and crafty around such as the Esphahnians. And so at that point the selling of those ostrich plumes, which Jack could’ve accomplished in a trice a year and a half ago in a thieves’ market in Linz, became a global conspiracy, yoking together Esphahnians as far away as London, Alexandria, Mocha, and Isfahan, as letters were sent to all of those places and more inquiring as to what ostrich-plumes were selling for, whether the trend was up or down, what distinguished a Grade A ostrich-plume from a B, how a B could be made to look like an A,
et cetera.
While they waited for the intelligence to come back, Jack had very little to do on the plume front.

His addled brain forgot about Turk for a while. When he finally went back to the livery stable, the owner was just about to sell him off to pay for all the hay he’d been eating. Jack paid the debt, and began to think seriously about how to turn the war-horse into cash.

N
OW IN THE OLD DAYS
it was like this: he would go and loiter around the Place Dauphine, which was the sharp downstream tip of the Île de la Cité, spang in the center of the Pont-Neuf. It was the royal execution grounds and so there was always something to see there. Even when there were no executions underway, there were mountebanks, jugglers, puppeteers, fire-eaters; failing that, you could at least gawk at the dangling remains of people who’d been executed
last
week. But on days of big military parades, the aristocrats who were supposedly in command—at least, who were being paid by King Looie to be in command—of various regiments would issue from their
pieds-à-terre
and
hôtels particuliers
on the Right Bank and come across the Pont-Neuf, recruiting vagrants along the way to bring their regiments up to strength. The Place Dauphine would become a vigorous body-market for a few hours.
Rusty firelocks would be passed out, money would change hands, and the new-made regiments would march south over to the Left Bank, to the cheers of the patriotic onlookers. They’d follow those aristocrats’ high-stepping chargers out through the city gates, there at the carrefours where the meaner sorts of criminals dangled unconscious from the whipping-posts, and they would come into St. Germain des Pres, outside the walls: a large quadrangle of monks’ residences surrounded by open land, where huge fairs of rare goods would sometimes convene. Following the Seine downstream, they’d pass by a few noble families’ hotels, but in general the buildings got lower and simpler and gave way to vegetable- and flower-patches tended by upscale peasants. The river was mostly blocked from view by the piles of timber and baled goods that lined the Left Bank. But after a while, it would bend around to the south, and they would cross the green before Les Invalides—surrounded by its own wall and moat—and arrive at the Champs de Mars where King Looie would be, with all of his pomp, having ridden up from Versailles to inspect his troops—which, in those pre-Martinet days, basically meant counting them. So the
passe-volantes
(as people like Jack were called) would stand up (or if unable to stand, prop themselves up on someone who could) and be counted. The aristocrats would get paid off, and the
passe-volantes
would fan out into innumerable Left Bank taverns and bordellos and spend their money. Jack had become aware of this particular line of work during a ride from Dunkirk to Waterloo with Bob, who had spent some time campaigning under John Churchill, alongside the French, in Germany, laying waste to various regions that had the temerity to lie adjacent to
La France.
Bob had complained bitterly that many French regiments had practically zero effective strength because of this practice. To Jack it had sounded like an opportunity only a half-wit would pass up.

In any case, this procedure was the central tent-pole holding up Jack’s understanding of how Paris worked. Applied to the problem of selling Turk, it told him that somewhere in the southern part of the Marais, near the river, there lived rich men who had no choice to be in the market for war-horses—or, if they had any brains in their heads at all, for stud-horses capable of siring new ones. Jack talked to the man who managed the livery stable, and he followed hay-wains coming in from the countryside, and he tailed aristocrats riding back from the military parades at the Champs de Mars, and learned that there was a horse-market
par excellence
at the Place Royale.

Now this was one of those places that Jack’s kind of person knew
only as a void in the middle of the city, sealed off by gates through which an attentive loiterer could sometimes get a flash of sunlit green. By trying to penetrate it from all sides, Jack learnt that it was square, with great barn-doors at the four cardinal compass-points, and high grand buildings rising above each of these gates. Around its fringes were a number of
hôtels
, which in Paris meant private compounds of rich nobles. Twice a week, the gates were jammed solid with carts bringing hay and oats in, and manure out, and an astounding number of fine horses being burnished by grooms. Some horse-trading went on in surrounding streets, but Jack could plainly see that this was little more than a flea-market compared to whatever was going on in the Place Royale.

He bribed a farmer to smuggle him into the place in a hay-wain. When it was safe to get out, the farmer poked him in the ribs with the handle of a pitchfork, and Jack wriggled and slid out onto the ground—the first time he had stood on growing grass since he’d reached Paris.

The Place Royale was found to be a park shaded by chestnut trees (in theory, that is; when Jack saw it the leaves had fallen, and been raked off). In the center was a statue of King Looie’s dear old pop, Looie the Thirteenth—on horseback, naturally. The whole square was surrounded by vaulted colonnades, like the trading-courts at Leipzig and the Stock Exchange at Amsterdam, but these were very wide and high, with barn-doors giving way to private courtyards beyond. All of the gates, and all of the arcades, were large enough, not merely for a single rider, but for a coach drawn by four or six horses. It was, then, like a city within the city, built entirely for people so rich and important that they
lived
on horseback, or in private coaches.

Only that could explain the size of the horse-market that was raging all around him when Jack climbed out of the hay-wain. It was as crowded with horses as the streets of Paris were with people—the only exceptions being a few roped-off areas where the merchandise could prance around and be judged and graded by the buyers. Every horse that Jack saw, he would’ve remembered as the finest horse he’d ever seen, if he’d encountered it on a road in England or Germany. Here, not only were such horses common, but they were meticulously groomed and brushed almost to the point of being polished, their manes and tails coiffed, and they’d been taught to do tricks. There were horses meant to be saddled, horses in matched sets of two and four and even six, for drawing coaches, and—in one corner—chargers: war-horses for parading beneath the eyes of the King on the Champ de Mars. Jack went
thataway and had a look. He did not see a single mount there that he would’ve traded Turk for, if he were about to ride into battle. But these were in excellent condition and well shod and groomed compared to Turk, who had been languishing in a livery stable for weeks, with only the occasional walk round the stable-yard for exercise.

Jack knew how to fix that. But before he left the Place Royale, he raised his sights for a few minutes, and spent a while looking at the buildings that rose over the park—trying to learn something about his customers-to-be.