The Blood of Lorraine (6 page)

When she stopped sniveling, Martin asked, “Whose idea was it to make up the story about the Jewish tinker?”

Geneviève Philipon shrugged. “I can’t remember.”

“But surely you can,” he insisted. “You remember everything else. You probably spread the story to the whole village.
Whose idea was it to blame a Jew
?” he asked again, giving emphasis to each word.

He watched as her mouth opened and closed a number of times before she finally told him, “Antoinette. The Jew was her idea.”

The wet nurse’s hesitations, more than her words, indicated that she was telling the truth. “Why would Antoinette Thomas invent such an elaborate lie?”

Geneviève Philipon shook her head, not daring to look at him. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

“Surely you must know. You said you were friends. Where would she get these ideas?” Martin leaned forward and glared at her, waiting.

“Maybe from a priest?” she finally offered.

“When? How?”

“A sermon, maybe, a sermon, about them, you know, the Jews.”

Her replies were barely audible. But their impact was explosive. Martin didn’t want to tangle with the bishop over the behavior of one of his priests. “Which priest?” he asked.

Geneviève Philipon shrugged her shoulders. “Her priest? I don’t know. I’m not saying nothing more. I can’t. I told you everything!” She wrapped her arms around her chest in a final gesture of defiance. She was biting down on her lips and breathing hard. Tears were trailing down her sallow cheeks. She had just betrayed her friend. She was through talking.

“Very well.” Martin suddenly rose from his chair. She had to get a taste of the consequences of her lies and her stubbornness, at least until he corroborated her testimony. “Charpentier, go get a policeman to accompany Mme Philipon to the jail. We’ll hold her until somebody decides to tell us the entire truth.”

“No, no, please.” The woman fell on her knees.

Without a word, Charpentier brushed past her on his way to the door. He could barely conceal the smirk on his face.

“Let me go home,” she pleaded. “My children. Someone has to be with them.”

“I will send Inspector Jacquette to see how your children are doing. I will also order him to question them about what happened.”

“No, sir, please. I didn’t do nothing wrong. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t their fault either.”

Martin turned his back on her. He could mete out mercy later, after he found out how a mother could tear open her own child and start a slanderous rumor, and who had put such a dangerous idea in her head in the first place. If it was a parish priest, Martin would have to move quickly to quash the slander before it spread.

“I
T WAS THE
J
EW THAT
did it,” Antoinette Thomas shouted as soon as she spotted Martin as she entered his office.

Martin watched with wary fascination as the uniformed officer pushed her forward. Her feet stuttered, just as Geneviève Philipon’s had. But not because she was timid or scared. Her scowls and expletives indicated that her resistance stemmed from defiance rather than fear. The veteran policeman sighed with relief when he finally shoved her into the witness chair in front of Martin’s desk. Antoinette Thomas promised to be a tough customer.

“It was him, I tell you,” she said again, her green eyes flashing, daring Martin to call her a liar. She did not flinch even as he made a show of scrutinizing her face. She sat straight up, arms crossed, returning his disapproving stare.

Antoinette Thomas was taller than Geneviève Philipon, and healthier. In less dire circumstances, she might have been considered an attractive woman, even seductive. Her thick dark brown hair stood out on each side of her face, the tangle of unruly curls bristling with electric energy. An angry ruddiness colored her cheeks, and some hidden store of pride stiffened her carriage. As she held back her head waiting for Martin to respond to her ridiculous accusation, she lifted her firm square chin and thrust her chest forward. Her breasts were not limp and dry like the wet nurse’s.

Yet these breasts had not nourished her son. If what the wet nurse had told Martin were true, Antoinette Thomas had not been a mother at all, beyond giving birth to the unfortunate Marc-Antoine. How could any true mother disembowel her own baby? Martin shuddered as he remembered the greenish-gray corpse lying in the morgue. And then, equally unbidden, came the image of his own dear wife, with her great belly, waiting eagerly for the day that she would nurse a child at her breast. Martin squeezed his eyes shut, for to think of Clarie as he looked upon Antoinette Thomas seemed almost a sacrilege.

Martin stayed very still for a moment, clearing his mind to prepare himself for battle. With a hard case like Antoinette Thomas, it might take all manner of threats and manipulation to get her to confess to what she had done and why, and, most important of all, to tell him who had incited her to make up her inflammatory little fable.

“The Jew,” she repeated, filling up a silence broken only by Charpentier clearing his throat at the little desk to the left of Martin and the muted sound of footsteps through the window behind him. Her voice was quieter and less confident. She crossed her arms over her chest again, protectively this time.

Martin leaned back in his chair, trying to effect a casual pose, even though his stomach was churning with disgust. “Madame Thomas,” he began, “before we get to your”—he paused to underline his skepticism—“your
accusations
, we need information for the official record. Please answer truthfully and slowly so Monsieur Charpentier can write everything down with utmost accuracy.”

Martin heard another cough, and much shuffling of papers behind him. Charpentier had caught on. Martin was about to grind the witness down by asking in slow, excruciating detail about her past and present life. He would make her spell out every name, every address, every date. And drive her a little mad in the process.

This should not have been difficult. Martin’s refusal to respond to her provocations seemed to have put her in a state of animal-like alertness. Although she maintained her pose, straight as a statue before him, the way she clutched her shawls together with white-knuckled fists gave her away.

Still, instead of answering Martin’s simplest questions, she hurled demands and invective at him and his clerk.

“Tell me why I am here! Ain’t it your job to find the Jew that killed my boy and took out his guts? Don’t you know about them, what they do? You bring in a poor, grieving mother, when they are out there right now finding more innocent children to use in their wicked ceremonies.”

She caught her breath and smiled for just an instant, as if she had surprised even herself with the last inventive flourish.

It was enough to get on anyone’s nerves. Nevertheless, Martin kept his voice low and steady. “Please spell your full name, maiden and married,” he repeated.

And repeated. Until she began to respond. Until she understood that this was a game she could not win. Martin proceeded, stony, methodical, and relentless, gathering both useful and useless information about her life. He wanted to make her squirm with impatience and annoyance. At the same time, he hoped that the routine triviality of his questions would lull her into a state of compliance, so that when they got to what she had done and why, she would blurt out her answers without thinking.

Once he got her started, she was quite forthcoming. As long as she could pour scorn on other people.

Geneviève Philipon “had always been a stupid cow. Kept behind in school, she was. That’s how I met her,” Antoinette Thomas explained. “It was me that had to help her with her numbers.”

When asked about her employer, she informed Martin that she worked at a factory owned by a “rich dirty old Jew. Working us to the bone to make his money.”

She was hardly kinder to her husband, who was “the one who wanted a kid.” The one “who comes home smelling of drink and dead animals’ blood and shit.” Her nostrils flared out with distaste. “He promised to get me out of the factory, then got me pregnant. The pig.”

“Then why did you marry him?” The question slipped out, unplanned. But, Martin thought, it might offer him an opening. If the husband felt the same contempt for his wife, Martin could turn them against each other. He shifted in his chair, eager to see what she would have to say.

“I married him because they paid us. They said we should be ‘wed in the eyes of God’ because we were
co-habiting
,” she sneered as she pronounced the fancy word, which evidently had been pressed into her limited vocabulary from some higher source. “What difference did it make to me?”

“Who paid you?”

“Them snooty ladies who like to stick their noses into everyone’s business.”

“The Saint Regius Society,” Martin mumbled. A charity propagated by those having too much time on their hands. Rich women who believed that they could turn the Antoinette Thomases of the world into pious bourgeois housewives despite the poverty and brutality of their lives. What cruel foolishness.

“Yeah, that one. And they would have paid me to nurse my kid too, but I couldn’t do it.”

“Couldn’t?” Martin asked, thinking of the proud, full breasts, which she had managed to keep well within his view. If only she knew how much her spite and hardness repulsed him, then maybe she would just relax back into the seat and stop trying to be provocative.

“How were we going to eat if I didn’t keep going to the factory, making that Jew rich?”

Well said, thought Martin, only barely restraining himself from shouting at her. Blame your predicament on the Israelites. Yet who
was
to blame? Fauvet had reminded him that mill women often sent their children to the country in order to keep on working. Many, if not most of them, including the vixen who sat in front of him, had no choice. He sighed. “And you chose Geneviève Philipon because…?” he asked

“Because,” she leaned forward and screwed her mouth into another sneer, “she still had her last one at her breast and I knew she was desperate after her husband kicked the bucket. Because,” she added as she sat back, “she’d take anything I gave her.”

“Let’s talk about you and Mme Philipon,” Martin said, clasping his hands around his stomach. His gaze roved slowly over every facet of Antoinette Thomas’s face, stopping at exactly the point where his eyes bored into hers. They had finally come full circle. To the pitiful dead body of little Marc-Antoine. To Antoinette Thomas’s blatant lies and ridiculous accusations. Back to what the wet nurse had told Martin.

After almost two hours of questioning, Antoinette Thomas was becoming restless, apprehensive. The bosom that she had so proudly thrust at him was taking in shorter and shorter breaths. The tense stillness of his own body made Martin’s chin prickle under his beard. He rubbed it with a slowness that he hoped would keep her on edge, while he considered the next step. If he began the most critical part of the interrogation by accusing her of mutilating her own son, he might set her off, either in a stream of denials or, if she cared anything about the little boy, a sudden flood of remorse and grief. Because he needed answers, not hysteria, he decided to save any talk of that gruesome scene by the stream in Tomblaine for last.

“Mme Philipon told me that it was
your
idea to accuse a Jewish tinker of killing your son.”

Antoinette Thomas shook her head in denial, jangling her curls, before thrusting out her chin and proclaiming, “She’s lying.” Antoinette Thomas stared straight into Martin’s eyes without so much as a flinch.

Martin persisted. “She even suggested that you might have gotten the idea that a Jew would do this to your son from a priest.”

“A priest!” Antoinette Thomas arched her eyebrows in surprise. The idea seemed to amuse her. “I haven’t been in a church since my first communion. Why should I bother? They’re for the rich too.”

“You just told me you got married—”

“Oh, yes, that. And you see what good it did me. Married.” She turned her head in disgust as she spat out the word. “No, no. Geneviève’s the one who listens to them and goes to confession and does what they say. A priest. The cow,” she scoffed.

“Then where did you get such a preposterous idea? From a political speech? Or your husband?” Antoinette Thomas’s assertion that the Church supported the rich had not escaped him. It suggested some acquaintance with anti-clerical politics.

She fell back in mock surprise. “Why do I need someone to tell me what everybody knows?”

Everybody
! A pulsating tension streamed down the side of Martin’s head from his temples to his jaw. Everybody! Did she mean all the tanners and factory workers and shopgirls living in the hovels that lined the river? The drunks trading insults and fisticuffs in working-class cafés, who would never dream of setting foot inside a church, as well as the pious and sober, like Geneviève Philipon, who, for all Martin knew, might hang on every word uttered by an ignorant country priest. Everybody! And she did not even know the half of it, the upper crust, the writers, the politicians, even those entrusted with dispensing justice, like the court’s own Alphonse Rocher.

“And what exactly is it,” Martin asked as his own breath became short and labored, “that everybody knows about the Israelites?”

Her eyes got wider than ever, as if she thought him quite daft. “What
is
it?”

“Yes, what is it that
everybody
knows? Tell me please.”

She hesitated. He nodded encouragement. She shrugged. And then she spewed it all out. They ran everything. From the Rothschilds and their banks in the big cities to the local shopkeeper who cheats poor people like her. They’re money-hungry. They stick together. Except they also want to be like us. If it weren’t for their noses, and their smell, Antoinette Thomas averred with the air of a schoolgirl concluding a successful recitation, we’d never be able to tell them apart. And, of course, she added hastily, suddenly mindful of her own circumstances, their religion encourages them to kill Christian babies and use the blood in their ceremonies.

It was quite a list. Things he would have never dreamed of saying about anyone, or reading, or hearing without objection. The kinds of things that undoubtedly drove Singer up the wall, Singer for whom dignity and decorum were so important. What was it that he had told Martin last Friday? “You are fortunate that you do not have to care about these things.” Not any more. Not if Martin was going to be a real friend to Singer or, for that matter, a principled republican judge. It was a distasteful business, one he had never thought he would have to confront. And here he was in the middle of it. He looked up to see Antoinette Thomas staring at him, waiting. Charpentier cleared his throat and shifted in his chair, also waiting. It was time.

“I see,” Martin said, hoping to communicate his disdain. “You believe all these slanders, do you? Is this why you made up that story about a Jewish peddler?”

“What story?” Her impudence knew no bounds. It was time to cut her down to size.

“The slander that an Israelite killed your child and cut him open. Your friend Geneviève Philipon has already told us that little Marc-Antoine choked to death. She told us it was you who decided to cover up the accident with this slander. You who gutted and castrated your own son.” His voice grew louder with every word, reaching a shouting, angry crescendo.

“She’s lying,” she brazenly repeated. But Antoinette Thomas had begun to shrink away from him. He had finally gotten to her.

“Lying?” Martin said with mocking skepticism. “She’s lying? My inspector is in Tomblaine right now getting testimony from the children. I doubt if they will lie.”

“They’re little idiots. They’ll say anything you tell them to.” She was hugging her shawls around her again, rocking from side to side. Scared but not surrendering.

“It will be much better for you if you tell me what happened. If you did not kill the child, if you covered it up for your own reasons, I want to know why.” It felt good to let out the heat that had been building up inside of him.

“I’ve lost my baby and you are going to let them get away with it.” Her voice was trembling now. He even saw a tear run down her cheek. But he had no way of knowing whether its source was remorse or fear.

“Confess. It will be better for you in the end. I may not even charge you. I’m not sure our Code has a name for the crime you have committed, mutilating your own dead child,” he said with contempt. “But we can and will indict you for slander, unless you stop telling these lies.” Did the Code have a name for the crime of slandering a whole race? Martin did not think so. But he counted on her ignorance to put the fear of God into her.

“It was the Jew! I told you!” He had forgotten. She had no God. There was only one remedy: a filthy cell, a few days on gruel to soften her up. But he had no intention of putting her in the same place as the spineless Geneviève Philipon.