The Painted Girls (16 page)

Antoinette

A
jailer with breath like boiled onions clomps ahead of me, past a string of weighty doors opened up onto dingy cells the breadth of two arms spread wide. Each is bare plaster, except for the iron grate forming the far wall and the single chair just in front. “These cells are for those coming to visit?” I say, and his highness slows his clomping and bothers with a flicker of a nod. “Don’t see why I been made to wait.” For every cell with a caller sunk onto the chair, a dozen more are as empty as my week’s been long.

The jailer halts, grunts, pointing the muzzle of his rifle, and I cross into the cell and hear the groan of the door closing behind my back. The cane seat of the chair has a gaping hole, a hole tearing wider when I plop down, not bothering to be light. I peer through the iron grate, across an intervening passageway, to a long row of cells, and guess Émile is to be put in the cell exactly facing my own. Another jailer, this one patrolling the length of the passageway, trudges by, his footsteps growing fainter as he retreats and then louder until he is again in front of my own cell. Three times more he passes by on his way to either end of the passageway, and I wait, feeling a breath away from my breakfast—fried potatoes nicked from a street vendor—rising up in my throat. It was Marie who started with the yelling, Marie who shoved first, Marie who screamed “murderer” when already my arm was raised. The hunched back of Charlotte, the bony rises of her ribs, were like the rolled-up shell of a pill bug awaiting a squashing fist. But I did not strike. I got up from Marie. Charlotte will forget. And Marie, she would have clobbered me worse than I did her if she had so much as a clue about how to fight. But still, the grease of the fried potatoes churns in my gut. I told a lie to Marie, a lie that was not white, and she knew it. I explained the rigmarole of getting an appointment, but already it was too late. Already I lied, saying I had not gone to Mazas. I only wanted to leave without a fuss, without Marie’s lip trembling and her eyes welling with tears, to hang on to the scrap of hopefulness that morning, finally arrived, had brought. But Marie yelled and shoved. The shoving back was a mistake. The hitting, too. I scared those two girls, and already they have more than enough to be fearful of in their lives.

The patrolling jailer passes by yet again, and still the cell exactly facing my own stays empty of Émile. I swallow hard and curl my fingers around the iron bars and wonder about him getting delivered to the wrong cell. Such dopey jailers. Such callousness. I lean my face in close to the iron grate, but they have it rigged so a visitor’s only view is into the cell straight across the passageway from his own. “Émile,” I call out. I turn my face, calling out again, and then I call louder.

The patrolling jailer is back, the brass buttons of his navy jacket winking in the light of the lamps. He pokes the bayonet of his rifle through the iron grate of my cell. “Shut your trap,” he says.

“Maybe if you brought the boy I come to see.” How long have I been waiting? An hour? Twenty minutes? I cannot guess. The passage of time must be the same for each prisoner, for Émile, all locked up.

“Another word and I’ll be arranging he don’t come at all.”

I lean back in that feeble, broken chair and watch him turn from the most brutish glare I can muster, taking his time, like there is pride in moving slow.

All the boys of Paris awaiting trial are jailed at Mazas, and I heard from more than one about the tedium of the place. They wake at six o’clock to the sound of a clanging bell, opening up their eyes to four white plaster walls and then rolling from the crammed hammocks where they spent the night. They wait for the door to creak open and the tray holding a paltry jug of bitter wine and a section of stale bread to be set down. The last of the drink sopped up, the last of the crumbs put into their mouths, there are six blank hours to fill with nothing more than folding up the hammocks and sweeping out the cells. At last the weariness is broken by the midday meal, the filling of the mess tins with soup swallowed so slow that always the last mouthful is cold. In the afternoon each prisoner goes to what they call the promenade but is really nothing more than a span of long, narrow walks open to the sky and cordoned off, one from the next, by towering walls. At Mazas there is no chance of a boy scheming with another about what is to be said before a judge, no chance of the comfort of an old friend while waiting out the hours. Émile suffers the same tedium but with the way they have him holed up with Vera and Billet, I imagine always he is watching his back, fear turning his blood sluggish and dragging out the hours even worse than for the rest.

I cling tighter to the iron grate, and next thing, there is the voice of Émile from beyond the cell facing mine. “No word of a lie,” he says, “those eyes of hers.” Passing into his cell now, he juts his chin in the direction of me, looks back to the escorting jailer. “Like I told you, chocolate pools.”

On Monday, after getting the news and rushing from the washhouse to Mazas, I went to the Opéra and joined those knitting, gossiping mothers lining the back wall of the practice room where the youngest petits rats were taking class. Upon catching my eye, Charlotte wrinkled up her forehead. I waved away her bewilderment, blew a kiss, and after that her attention was back on the string of steps Madame Théodore was calling out, the music streaming from the violin. Other girls jumped higher. Two were lighter upon their feet. But I could see the music reaching deep inside her and for a minute, just watching, I was lifted up. It was not right that Charlotte, with her air of boldness and courage and heart, and her dingy practice skirt and grimy cheeks and uncombed hair, like a rooster tail springing from her head, was the most bedraggled of those skinny girls.

Afterward I said, “You feel the music deeper than those other rats,” and that snippy girl, she said, “You’re supposed to be scrubbing linens with Maman.”

I stroked her cheek, and she stood there, arms limp at her sides, eyes too weary for so young a face, and I felt a little pang that the child was taking on Marie’s habit of worrying. “I was delivered a message at the washhouse, and I told Maman you fainted at the Opéra, that you were asking for me. I can’t say more but just let on.”

“You went off, shirking work for that boy.” Her eyes shifted from weary to stone-cold. Already, even without the news of Mazas, she was poisoned against Émile, poisoned by Marie.

I took the hands of that small girl. I could not endure the questions of Marie, the brutality of Maman if I was forced to tell the true message of Michel Knobloch. Not tonight. Not after such a day. “Just this once.”

“I want a new sash—scarlet,” she said back; and later, in the evening, with her spinning a story of collapsing at the barre and getting a pastille to suck from Madame Théodore and then answering the queries of Maman without stumbling a single time, I felt not a bit proud about the lying of that small girl being an equal match to my own.

É
mile sits with those burly thighs of his a little parted, those brawny hands clutching just above his knees. He leans in from the waist, forehead almost touching the iron grate, eyes peering out steadier than a flat rock. There is no twitching, scratching, swallowing. No glancing away. “I had no part in the butchering,” he says.

The day after Michel Knobloch brought the news of Mazas, I opened up the door of our lodging room in the evening to Marie sitting at our small table, bent over a newspaper, and I knew that somewhere between the Opéra and the rue de Douai she came upon a news seller hollering the names of Émile Abadie and Pierre Gille. “Antoinette,” she said, hopping up. “Sit down. A glass of water? Maman, pour a glass for Antoinette.”

Maman said, “You’re pale as bleached linen.”

“Émile is in Mazas,” Marie said, “arrested for robbing and murdering the tavern owner in Montreuil.” She put a hand to her heart, and I saw the rawness where, worse than ever, the flesh of her thumb was picked away.

Maman fell onto a chair. I watched her hand twitch, longing for the flask in the pocket of her skirt.

“I already know,” I said. Marie’s hand dropped to her side and ease came to her face.

“That boy who keeps you out half the night?” Maman said.

“Wasn’t Émile,” I said.

Marie touched the newspaper, quiet as a mouse. “Witnesses saw him going into the tavern. Two of them.”

“It was the other boy, Pierre Gille, slit the neck,” I said.

“Émile Abadie told you that?” Marie said.

“It’s what I know to be true.” I lifted my chin, looked hard at Maman and then Marie. “I saw it in a vision. It was the hand of Pierre Gille upon the knife.”

The mouth of Marie gapes open, then closed, like a fish.

“Spit it out, whatever it is you got to say.”

Again she touches the newspaper. “It says right here Émile Abadie was the lover of the woman Bazengeaud,” she said. Maman took the flask from her pocket, slugged good and long, licked the shine of the absinthe from her lips.

T
he face of Émile collapses into his cupped hands. He rattles his head. “I only wanted money,” he says, and face still hanging, adds, “Not a single sou saved. Always spending what’s in my pocket.”

Better than anyone I know his generosity, but I say no such thing.

“I got to be such a disappointment.” From beneath his eyebrows he looks between his fingers, waiting. Waiting for what? A choked no from me? A head shook? I feel a tiny tug, the slack of a leash taken up. But, no, he’s got to say about the woman Bazengeaud, whether all those times on the chaise, in the stairwell, pushed up against a stone wall with me were not even real.

He drops his hands, and his eyes lock onto my own. “I found my pockets empty one night. My belly was aching and rumbling for food.” He licks his lips. “Gille, he was going on about how he collected fifty francs from his mother’s old housemaid, all for keeping quiet about her lowering her drawers for him.”

He tells me how pretty soon he and Pierre Gille were galloping over to Montreuil, all feverish with the idea of threatening the woman Bazengeaud. One hundred francs she would pay him, that, or Émile would squawk to her husband about the whore she truly was.

“Always she was pulling up a chair beside me, groping at the buttons of my trousers, stroking, bringing me a cognac on the house,” he says. “But, Antoinette, what you got to know is that every scrap of that toying was before you. Rest assured. A long time ago.”

I breathe deep, slow, think about Marie as a tiny fly creeping along the wall. That fly, with its doubting mind and wary eyes, even it would see the way each detail meshes with those plucked from the newspaper. And didn’t he say about carrying on with the woman Bazengeaud without a bit of prodding from me? That fly would see the way it points to the truth of his words. The gas lamps flare a moment, licking bright the dull plaster of the walls. “You’re not a disappointment,” I say.

“I got it in my head you were going to find another sweetheart, Antoinette. You are always saying about a lodging room of our own, and that little drawstring pouch you’re keeping safe, I saw a chance to triple the weight.”

He goes on to tell me it turned out the woman Bazengeaud only smirked and snapped her cleaning rag against his chest. “Wouldn’t have bothered with a boy, now, would I, if I had a husband cared in the least?” she said. “You go ahead, Émile. Tell him whatever you please.”

She topped up his cognac, told Pierre Gille to pay up if he wanted a drop more. She was off, wiping down the counter, when Pierre Gille pounded a fist against the tabletop and spat low words about not coming all the way to Montreuil for a thimbleful of swill, about the strongbox yawning open not five steps away.

“There wasn’t a speck of fondness in me for the old hag,” Émile says, “but I got more decency than to rob a woman just topped up my glass.”

He drained the last of the cognac down, and left Pierre Gille railing and fuming and calling Émile skittish as a wet cat.

The clacking heels of the patrolling jailer grow close, and the two of us shift to sitting straight, away from the iron grate, until he is past. Then Émile rocks onto the hind legs of his chair. “Gille told me it’d be easy,” he says, staring at the blankness of the ceiling above.

“The blackmailing?”

He tips back to upright. “Course the blackmailing. I wouldn’t never have gone along if I knew he had a knife. I swear to you, Antoinette, it was Gille slit the throat.”

I make a tiny nod, feel my elbows, drawn tight against my sides, turn slack. “I know it’s true.”

And then for the first time in all my days, I see the eyes of Émile Abadie grow damp. A noise—like the sash of a window getting unstuck—comes up from the back of his throat and then he is wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand. “You’re all I got in the world, Antoinette.”

I want to fix what is broke, to say about the court hearing both sides, those great minds all trained on learning the truth, but I remember him being put with the butcher from the rue Flandre, the Italian with the brother pierced full of holes, and even with the door behind me tight against the jamb, I feel a waft of cold breath upon the back of my neck.

He strokes the weighty ridge of his brow, wagging his head from side to side. “When we first come to Mazas,” he says, “Gille was in front, with an inspector, and me following behind.” He shuts his eyes. “The inspector, he said to Gille, loud enough to ensure I was hearing the words, ‘Come on, Gille. You look honest enough. You couldn’t have committed a murder. You were led by Abadie, in which case, you should tell us everything. We’ll keep your honesty in mind. Be sure of that.’”

Behind me there is the sound of metal against metal, a key turning in the lock, and then the voice of the jailer who brought me to my cell saying, “Your thirty minutes are up.”

“I just finished sitting down,” Émile says from behind both my grate and his.

The jailer smirks, folds his arms across his puffed-up chest. “Shouldn’t have finished that smoke.” He takes my arm, hauls me to my feet.