Ran Away (7 page)

Since the old King’s death two years ago, and the accession of his feckless brother to the throne, censorship had grown stricter. It was now against the law to criticize the Church, and men had started disappearing, arrested by the White Terror – the secret police – for no particular reason. Political parties – even political discussion-groups – were outlawed, and it was in fact illegal for more than twenty people to meet together for any purpose whatsoever, which made parties in the painter Carnot’s attic rather chancy affairs.

For which reason January found it interesting that Daniel ben-Gideon – the son of one of the wealthiest bankers in Paris – would have taken up haunting the White Cat. Were there to be trouble some night, none of the nobles surrounding the throne would put himself forward to rescue Moses ben-Gideon’s son from punishment: a Jew, with merely money to recommend him. A jumped-up banker who’d made his fortune lending money to such appalling parvenus as the Bonapartes.

Which meant that ben-Gideon, who made it a point to belong to every social circle in Paris and to read every one of its hundred-plus newspapers, was of the opinion that the radicals who called for the King’s downfall might very well win.

‘I’ve met Sabid,’ said ben-Gideon at last. ‘He’s as fanatical about bringing factories and State education to the Sublime Porte as Hüseyin is about handing everything over to the
imams
. If I hadn’t, I’d have said:
Good luck and leave me out of it
 . . .’

‘But God help anyone,’ said January quietly, ‘who is caught between two fanatics. Particularly a woman.’

‘Amen.’ Ben-Gideon stood up, plump and comfortable in his shabby clothing, a balding mama’s boy of thirty-two – January’s own age – who sweated when he walked and would undoubtedly call for a bath the moment he returned to his parents’ very elegant town-house  . . .  But who had not, January guessed, wasted a moment of his evening of drinking bad wine and listening to what was being said by the angry poor.

‘I’ll find out what I can. My impression is that Sabid al-Muzaffar is the kind of man who would not baulk at harming the innocent to regain his position in the Sultan’s good graces. But I want your word, Benjamin.’ Ben-Gideon shook an admonishing finger. ‘If you find this girl has located her family and gone back to them, you’re not to breathe a word of it to Hüseyin without asking me first. If she’s managed to get herself to safety I’ll not have anything to do with sending her back. For one thing,’ he added with a quick grin, ‘the Rothschilds would cut Father completely if I did, and then I’d be in the street.’

January crossed the fingers of both hands, the way the children did back on the plantation for luck: ‘May the witches ride me three times around the moon if I tell,’ he replied solemnly, picked up his wine cup from the table and tipped the dregs on to the floor, as all his aunties said that you were supposed to do, to keep the spirits away. ‘Family is family, but the Rothschilds—’

A child in the colonnade called out, ‘Flics on the way!’

So much, thought January, for Bourrèges’ program of bribery. Ben-Gideon said, ‘Damn!’ and the men at the table nearest them said things considerably stronger, and January caught his friend by the wrist and plunged at once for the back door. Men were pouring out of the cellar door, blundering into those who were trying to fight their way out and toward the Rue des Petits Champs. January dragged ben-Gideon out the doorway, across the stinking little yard, through the gate and into the nearest doorway—

‘Hey, there, mister!’ protested the woman already occupying that dark niche.

A faint, youthful voice from between her and the wall added: ‘Look here, now—’

‘Pardon us, Mademoiselle.’ January bowed, and his companion dug in a pocket for a couple of coins. ‘Pardon us, M’sieu.’

In the Rue des Petits Champs voices were raised. There was the sound of blows. The police had been waiting for fugitives there.

January tested the door at the rear of the rather crowded embrasure, found it locked, and kicked it – hard. The wood jerked and cracked – ‘You’re paying for this, you know,’ he informed ben-Gideon – and he kicked the door again. This time the lock splintered away from the frame, and January, ben-Gideon, the girl, and her customer all tumbled inside just as the owner of the establishment, an elegantly black-clothed gentleman with a countenance straight out of an antique painting and a vocabulary straight out of the sewers, strode into the tiny back-room.

‘What the goddam hell—?’

‘Flics.’ Ben-Gideon caught the gentleman’s wrist and deposited five silver francs on the palm of his white kid glove.

His face like a Flemish saint who’s just bitten on a lemon, the gentleman said, ‘Well, you ain’t bloody goin’ out through the goddam salon an’ upsettin’ my goddam gentlemen. This’s a goddam respectable place. You stay the fuck here an’ don’t cause no goddam trouble. You—’ He caught the girl’s arm in one hand, her customer’s in the other: the boy looked about sixteen, pasty-faced and terrified. ‘Get back out there.’

‘Oh, here.’ Ben-Gideon handed the gentleman another two francs. By the sound of it, the police raid had boiled back into the alley and a riot was starting. Shouts echoed from the high walls, and the fouled cobblestones rang as roof tiles and bricks were hurled from the windows of the rooms above. ‘They’re with us.’

The gentleman shoved the back door more or less back into position and shot the bolts. ‘Fucken Jacobins.’

January, ben-Gideon, the student – whose name was LeMoreau and who hailed from Brussels – and the whore all remained in the back room of what January guessed was the downstairs portion of the gambling hall
Au Bon Oncle
for an hour or more. Since the downstairs was mostly a wine shop, the glow of lamplight came through the curtain and with it the rise and fall of voices; upstairs, January knew, there would be new-style Argand lamps and almost total silence broken only by the rattle of the dice box and the voices of the croupiers. Here, downstairs, there were women’s voices as well. Once someone asked, ‘What on earth is going on out there?’

The owner’s deep voice replied, ‘I believe it to be police trouble, sir. Nothing to concern us here.’

‘I presume he pays the police more than Bourrèges does,’ murmured January.

‘Nonsense,’ retorted ben-Gideon, perched on a box of candles playing cards with the girl. ‘Nobody pays more than Bourrèges does.’

The shouting in the alleyway reached a crescendo, then faded away. January guessed that police had come into the White Cat from the front as well as the alley, and if so, there had probably been fighting in the colonnade as well. But he guessed Ayasha had had the good sense to head straight into the dark central gardens at the first sign of trouble, and stay there.

When the disgruntled gentleman returned to the back room to give them the all-clear and unbolt the back door, nothing stirred in the wet blackness outside except a few scurrying rats, definite proof that things were back to normal. Stumbling on broken bricks and roof tiles that littered the alley, January and his companion worked their way around through the maze of medieval streets and stinking gutters that lay between the upriver side of the Palais Royal and the Butte St Roche, and so, eventually, back into the Palais gardens again. To judge by the crowds, one would think nothing out of the ordinary had happened – which in fact it had not. As he’d suspected, he found Ayasha at the café table where he’d left her, playing dominoes with Carnot.

‘There!’ she said in triumph. ‘You owe me ten centimes!’

‘Witch.’ The painter dug in his pocket. ‘You need to keep better control of your wife, Janvier – bloody hell, I haven’t a sou. Let me paint a portrait of you—’

‘You come up and carry water upstairs for me,’ retorted Ayasha, ‘and I’ll forgive you. There was scarcely any fighting out here,
Mâlik
; Bourrèges is swearing he’ll have the Police Superintendent’s job for this. A hundred francs a week, he pays! Will you join us for coffee, Daniel?’

‘I think –’ ben-Gideon bent to kiss her hand – ‘I shall decline the pleasure for the moment. Benjamin, I shall see you tomorrow night, I hope with something to tell. Heaven knows if I shall even be able to get a cab, dressed like this. I’ve had rather enough excitement for one evening.’

January – remembering back to the morning’s abrupt wakening in the fog – replied, ‘I couldn’t agree more.’

FIVE

T
he following afternoon – after a morning spent giving piano lessons to various young ladies of the aristocracy and three hours rehearsing with the Opera chorus – January, instead of returning to dinner and, it was to be hoped, an hour of rest at Ayasha’s side, made his way up the river to Charenton.

The villa rented by Sabid al-Muzaffar lay four miles from the Rue Le Peletier where the Opera stood, near the Bois de Vincennes, a detached villa in its own grounds surrounded by gardens and a pink brick wall. But January ascertained, by dint of inquiring for a fictitious brother who might have taken employment in the district, that there was no concubine nonsense about al-Muzaffar. ‘As good as a Christian, he is,’ proclaimed Madame Lyons, who kept the local café. ‘Except for going to church on Friday instead of Sunday, and what is that, eh? But no falling on his knees five times a day and refusing to sit at my tables just because I might happen to use a little honest salt-pork in my stew.
The Lord knows what’s in a man’s heart whether he’s on his knees or on his feet
, says he – and it’s always beat me, how anything gets done in those Mohammedan countries, with everyone stopping what they’re doing five times a day  . . .  And
I
say, the good Lord will prosper us only if we lend Him a hand and prosper ourselves, without always slacking off to pray.’

‘I couldn’t agree more.’ January gazed consideringly through the windows at the rain-wet lane that led toward Sabid’s villa, as if expecting to see this paragon of secular rationality appear at any moment. ‘Yet what do his servants think of this? Surely it would be difficult for him to find men of his own faith who share his outlook.’

‘He’d not have them around him, he says.’ By her tone she considered this a further mark of civilization. ‘He’s not a man to go bringing in a lot of Infidel devils into our village—’

For the district around Charenton was much more like a village than it was like a part of Paris.

‘—when there’s good men hereabouts needing the work in these hard times.’ She glared and nodded, as if January had announced his opposition to this view of the matter. ‘Laurent – my godson, who works as a footman in his house – says the only heathen servants are the grooms, who speak no French and keep to themselves in the stables where they belong, and whether they pray or not, Modeste – that’s the coachman, whose mother is my neighbor and has a tongue in her head that a Christian woman should take shame to herself to own! – Modeste has no idea. Not that Modeste could tell the difference between a priest’s sermon and a donkey’s bray!’

There followed an embittered diatribe against Modeste and his mother, whose father had cheated Madame Lyons’ father out of farmland that would have kept her from the indignity of having to run a café in the first place, not that she had the slightest objection to honest work  . . .  to which January listened with patience before guiding the conversation back to Sabid and his servants.

There were five grooms, and two eunuch servants for Sabid’s wife – ‘Not that anyone ever sees
her
, but what can you expect? A man needs a wife, and no Christian woman could be expected to marry a Mohammedan  . . .  But, Laurent tells me, His Excellency keeps to one wife and doesn’t go bringing in those nasty concubines. And his wife’s servants are respectable old women – barrin’ those nasty eunuchs, which I don’t hold with, but I will say there’s some in
this
land that could do with having capons in their henyards instead of roosters.’

‘But this is astonishing,’ exclaimed January. ‘My brother gave me the impression – I don’t know why – that His Excellency’s circumstances were reduced. Yet so large a household—’

‘Your brother,’ retorted Madame Lyons, ‘has no notion of how the aristocracy lives – hand to mouth and in the pockets of moneylenders, who should be outlawed from any Christian country! As for His Excellency, it’s true he had to flee from Constantinople, through wicked lies that was told about him by an enemy who had the Sultan’s ear. But he has friends in this country, good friends who owed him for favors he did them, and he doesn’t do so badly, Laurent says.
And
, Laurent says, he’s seen any number of wealthy gentlemen at His Excellency’s – not those lazy nobles that hang about the King, but bankers like M’sieu Rothschild and M’sieu Bethmann, even if they are Jews, and folk like that fellow Savart who made such a fortune selling boots to the Army back under the Emperor, though what France was doing with an Italian Emperor is more than I can stomach  . . .  and Englishmen like that M’sieu Polders who owns all those factories and banks.’

This information gleaned, January strolled down the lane that Madame Lyons had pointed out to him and took as good a look at al-Muzaffar’s house as he could without being conspicuous. This wasn’t easy for a man six-feet three-inches tall and proportioned like a coal-black oak-tree, so January took care not to linger. Still, he formed an impression of a dwelling far less palatial than that of Hüseyin Pasha, with a garden to one side and a single-story stable building at the rear.

Five horses, he estimated as he turned his steps back toward the Rue de Bercy. Not nearly enough to justify the keeping of five grooms.

Bodyguards?

The house itself was two floors plus an attic. Plenty of room to keep a woman prisoner up under that tall mansard roof. If Sabid’s wife had eunuchs of her own there was no reason for the French servants to even know.

A horseman was approaching him on the grassy verge of the road, but January didn’t realize it was Sabid al-Muzaffar until the man was opposite him: such was the effect, he realized – looking up into the brown Arabian face, the hooked nose and aloof dark eyes – of Western clothing. The man wore neat riding-breeches and English boots, a trim coat of dark-gray superfine wool, and a white neckcloth, without a single pin or jewel or flare of color to speak of the East.