The Moneylender of Toulouse (10 page)

“And my pay for searching?” I asked.

“A penny a day, and a report of your work each morning,” he said. He reached into a purse at his waist. “There's three pennies to start. Two for tonight, one for tomorrow. Will that suffice?”

“Until Advent is over,” I said. “At which point I resume my foolish ways.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “If it isn't found by then, we will abandon the effort and await the extortionists.”

He held out his hand. I took it.

“You may leave by the door you entered,” he said.

I pulled my knife out.

“You first,” I said.

He sighed, and got up.

We walked to the north entrance. He opened the door and looked out cautiously. I gave him a gentle shove and he stumbled outside. No one attacked him. I slipped past him into the darkness as he stepped back into God's house.

As I reached the next corner, I heard a dog growl at me briefly from an alleyway.

“Make sure I'm not being followed,” I said softly in that direction. “Meet me at the Miller's Wheel.”

I turned left, and walked down toward the Comminges quarter. The tavern was much livelier now, filled with millers, the boatmen who rowed to the Ile de Tounis with empty barrels and sacks of grain and returned with empty sacks and barrels of flour, and those who sought to part these hardworking men from their hard-earned pay. I did not see Armand nor, to my relief, the burly men who had turned me into a projectile a few hours earlier. I bought a large pitcher of ale, picked up two cups, and sat at a bench at the side of the ruckus, keeping an eye on the door.

Pelardit wandered in about ten minutes later. He caught my eye and gave me the all clear signal. I held up one of the cups and he was at my side in an instant. I poured, and we bumped cups. Gently, so as not to lose a precious drop.

“I am working for Father Mascaron now,” I muttered.

His eyebrows rose so high, I thought they might reappear on the nape of his neck.

“I'll tell you all about it later,” I said. “You can put me up tonight? I missed the closing of the gates. One disadvantage to living in Saint Cyprien.”

He nodded.

“But first, let us finish the contents of this pitcher,” I said.

He nodded more happily.

One pitcher was not enough. By the time we finished the third, the place had begun to clear. It was only Tuesday, after all, and a working man has to pace his drinking. We staggered back to Pelardit's place. which was a single room over another tavern in the Daurade parish. He had constructed a system of broad shelves on which he kept dozens of props and costumes, neatly folded and organized. He pulled out a bedroll from one and tossed it to me, then sat down on a pallet in the corner and pulled off his boots.

“Thanks,” I said, unrolling the bedroll. “Let me tell you about today.”

He nodded and looked at me expectantly. I told him everything, from the court proceedings through my transactions with Father Mascaron. When I was done, he looked thoughtful, then held his arms over his head, curving them and bringing his hands together so that they outlined the shape of a miter.

“I don't know how much the Bishop is involved in this yet,” I said. “Mascaron could be following his orders, or taking the initiative in protecting him. Certainly, they were working together when Mascaron tried to loot Borsella's office.”

He pretended to read something.

“I don't know what's in that book,” I said. “I doubt that it's merely an account of secret debts owed by the Bishop. That hardly seems worth the trouble that they are going to. A brazen burglary is the mark of desperation.”

He pointed to me, then rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.

“Yes, hiring an untrustworthy lowlife like me seems even more desperate,” I agreed. “And it's very convenient that he is employing me to find something that would help me in my own mission. But I don't think he really hired me because he wants me to find the book.”

Pelardit looked at me quizzically, then his eyes widened in comprehension.

“Right,” I said. “He hired me so that he could keep an eye on me.”

He stood and walked a few steps. Then one of his legs was yanked into the air by an invisible rope.

“That occurred to me, too,” I said. “It could very well be a trap.”

CHAPTER 5

As I came up through the trapdoor into our rooms, a trio of small, unidentifiable objects came flying at my head. I caught them, one after the other, and juggled them in a basic pattern until I recognized them as fresh biscuits. I started taking bites out of each, still juggling them as I did.

“Good morning,” said Claudia. “We have some grape compote to go with them.”

“Compote is too hard to juggle,” I said. I caught the half-eaten biscuits and carried them over to our table. She placed the compote before me, and I spread some on the biscuits.

“Much better,” I said.

“How was your evening?” she asked.

“Eventful,” I said, and I recounted it to her.

“Some men do get killed over debts,” she said when I was done. “Maybe that's all this is. Not the Bishop, necessarily, but some other secret debtor.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Although I wouldn't put it past Mascaron to have it done. Or to do it himself, for that matter.”

“Only then he wouldn't have been searching for the book afterwards,” she pointed out. “He would have had the key to the drawer, and gone right to it.”

“True enough,” I said. “But if it was some other secret debtor, I would assume that he would simply destroy the book.”

“Unless he saw a way to use it for profit,” she said. “A man desperate enough to kill for a debt might commit other crimes for money. He could have seen all of the names as an opportunity for extortion.”

“So we would need a list of secret debtors who are now candidates to be extorted,” I said. “Which means our best leads are the Borsella household and those of his brothers. Where's Helga, by the way?”

“Already gone to Milon Borsella's house,” said Claudia. “She said Evrard went straight there after the inquest and waited upon the widow for the rest of the day. The two brothers escorted Béatrix home, stayed for a few minutes, then went their different ways.”

“Why don't you pay your respects to Béatrix?” I suggested. “Bring your lute, offer to provide some comforting music.”

“All right,” she said. “Where are you off to?”

“I am going to poke around Bonet Borsella's life,” I said. “Maybe track down Armand and get him drunk and talking. He probably has a head start on the first part.”

“How was Pelardit last night?”

“He did fine. He's going to trail me again today. I am glad that you got him rather than Jordan.”

“I thought that a silent man would be a better shadow than a noisy one,” she said. “Be home for dinner tonight.”

“I will,” I promised. I swallowed the last of the biscuits and left.

*   *   *

Bonet, as the inheritor of the bulk of his father's estate, lived in a fortified château near the Montardy Square. While it lacked the tower that showed true wealth along with the fear of suddenly having it taken away, the house was still impressive, looming over a row of street-level shops. The shops here sold silks and spices, high quality merchandise that must have brought in a nice bit of change, although they weren't doing much business when I walked by them.

The courtyard gate was closed, and a single guard stood in front of it, leaning on a spear and trying to look alert. I approached him.

“Is your master at home?” I asked.

“Not likely,” he said. “No money to be made at home.”

“It depends on your business, I suppose. If he is not here, where am I most likely to find him?”

“Lately, he's been spending all of his time at the new sawmill,” said the soldier. “Just finished building it, and he runs to it every morning when a sensible man of wealth would be looking to his mistress.”

“A man of wealth who looks to a mistress rather than his business will usually end up without wealth, business or mistress,” I said. “Where is this new sawmill?”

“At the Bazacle dam,” he said. “You can't miss it. Just listen for the sound of trees screaming their last.”

I thanked him and left, passing by Pelardit, who was engrossed in examining some silks at one of the shops.

At the northern end of the bourg, where the walls reached the river, the Garonne makes a dogleg to the left, sending part of its waters coursing through a channel between an island and the banks. It was shallow enough at that point that you used to be able to walk across, but thirty years ago the millers built a dam across it. They said it was the longest dam in Christendom, and I believed them. A double row of pilings, smeared with pitch and filled with rubble. The river butted its head against this wall over and over again, surging with frustration, seeking a way through, finding itself at the beck and call of the puny two-legged creatures who clung to its shores and reined it in.

And once they had enslaved the river, they forced it to do their bidding, diverting it through sluices and canals, spinning waterwheel after waterwheel, their shafts turning complicated arrangements of gears, cams, belts and millstones. Freed from the uncertainties of their floating counterparts, the millers ground grain for flour, bark for the tanners, and most importantly, what made me kneel before them and give my most fervent blessings for their existence, malt and beer mash for the brewers.

The new sawmill was perched on the mainland, near the top of the island. On the other side of the sluice gates, barges carrying denuded trees floated gently to a wharf, where teams of burly men waited to wrest them onto land, after which several boys would simply roll them through the last leg of their journey.

The sawmill itself was a giant shed, open at both ends. The roof at the far end projected over a pair of waterwheels, one set lower than the other to tax the water a second time as it charged through the mill run. The upriver one was twenty feet high, the second maybe fifteen, and they both turned lengthy oak trunks, each bedecked with several large gears that spun smaller gears that were attached in turn to saw-wheels, bright spinning steel discs that spat yellowed dust through the air as they screeched through the logs.

The men who shoved the logs into the saw-blades were large of limb and short on fingers. I found myself doing a quick count of my own, and was relieved to find exactly ten, neither more nor less. Either of the latter results would have proved disturbing.

At the end closest to me, other sawyers were shaping the planks with two-man blades or planing them to more uniform smoothness, activities I found enjoyable to watch, especially since I didn't have to do any of them. I have nothing but respect for those lumbering men who reduce logs to more manageable shapes. During my last sojourn at the Guild haven in the Black Forest, I had taken my turn with those who were building the new Guildhall. We had no waterwheels turning blades, so were forced to make do with two-man saws. Several days of that made me grateful that my regular profession just involved falling on my face, juggling knives and avoiding the occasional death threat.

Bonet Borsella was down by the lower waterwheel, supervising a pair of men who were constructing a curious contraption. A vertical gear linked to a horizontal one that turned a stout pole. Mounted at the top was another wheel that had short rods projecting diagonally from it. The two men were trying to wrestle a pole of young, green wood into a bent position just below the upper wheel. I went over to get a closer look. Despite their best efforts, it kept springing back upright.

“I was like that when I was young and green,” I remarked to Borsella.

“Weren't we all?” he said. “Make yourself useful and help them.”

I went over and added my weight to the pole as the other two brought it carefully down.

“Over to the right,” directed Borsella, and we eased the end of it to a point just under the upper wheel on the vertical shaft.

“Good,” he said.

He took a rope and looped it over the end of the bent pole, then tied it to a metal hook set into the floor. One of the other men wedged a prop under the spring-pole and secured it.

There was a hole, about two inches in diameter, bored through the upper end of the spring-pole. The two men picked up a straight saw-blade that had a long wooden handle at one end. They raised it vertically and slipped the handle through the hole, then fastened it in position with pegs. The handle poked about six inches through the other side of the spring-pole, and the blade was now dangling freely underneath.

“Carefully now,” said Borsella.

He and one of the men held onto the rope holding the end of the spring-pole while the other one loosened it. They allowed the spring-pole to rise until the handle of the saw came up against the upper wheel.

“Right there! Tie it off quickly,” said Borsella.

The other man retied the rope at the hook, then stood back expectantly. Borsella and the man holding the ropes let go.

As the upper wheel turned, the projecting rods forced the saw-handle down. When the rod passed, the handle was released, and the spring-pole snapped back to the upper limit of the rope, putting the handle in line for the next rod to repeat the process.

In other words, as the wheel turned, the saw-blade moved back and forth in midair without the aid of a single man.

“Marvelous,” I said, applauding. “If you were a Roman emperor, you could justly say, ‘Veni, serra secavi, vici' at this moment.”

“What does that mean?” asked Bonella.

“I came, I sawed, I conquered,” I replied.

“We'll see,” said Bonella, smiling. “I saw this arrangement at a mill up north. I am not convinced that it's stable enough to be of use, but it looks worth the experiment.”