The Rhetoric of Death (22 page)

T
hick fog blanketed the city, and though it was the first day of August, summer seemed to have fled in the night. Hunched against the chill, Charles slid on patches of slippery grass as he made his way to the water level on the downriver side of the Petit Pont. The weather was no doubt punishment for the lie that had gotten him out of the college, he thought wryly. But at least he had permission to go alone. A twinge in his jaw made him wonder if his excuse of needing a tooth-drawer was becoming reality and part of the list of penances he was earning. He'd come to the river, that much was true. And he was meeting the porter down toward the Pont Neuf, where Frère Fabre had said there were tooth-drawers' booths.

Shouts and grunts were loud in the wet air and the smell of wood was sharp in Charles's nose as he threaded his way through men unloading logs from a barge tied up at the quay. The ghostly outlines of bales, baskets, crates, boats covered with hooped canvas like wagons, boats with masts, flat-bottomed boats poled from their sterns, appeared and disappeared as he walked. Hoping he'd recognize the place where he'd seen Pierre and the other porters the day before, he peered through the fog's shifting veils and caught a glimpse of the Louvre's east end across the river. This must be more or less the right place. He started whistling a marching song he'd learned at the siege of St. Omer. After a few repetitions, a wheezy voice came back out of the fog, singing the melody's bawdy words.

“Do they know you know that one?” the ex-soldier said, materializing in front of Charles. “Your abbot and such, I mean.”

“We don't have abbots.” Charles laughed. “But you're right, I don't sing that song much. I realize I don't know your name,
monsieur
,” he added politely.

“And I've forgotten yours, if I ever knew it. Better that way. Come on, I'm taking you to where Pierre lives, he doesn't want to be seen talking to you.”

“Where?” Charles didn't move.

“Nothing to worry about, I wouldn't do a fellow soldier wrong. Pierre's jumpy, is all.”

They moved off into the fog, which seemed to thicken. Charles matched his stride to the man's short legs, but looked warily back over his shoulder, wishing he could see more than a foot or two in any direction.

“Someone after you, too?” His guide cocked an assessing eye up at him. “About this ‘accident?' ”

“Why?” Charles noted the way the man said
accident
. “Is someone after Pierre?”

“He says so. Following him, he says. But he's drinking a lot, mind you, so it might all be out of his cup.”

Charles hoped it was too early in the day for Pierre to be in his cups. They started across the Pont Neuf, turning a little more of Charles's lie into truth. Unlike the city's other bridges, this one bore no houses, just small open shop booths built into its half-round niches, with a raised walkway along them. The booths and the vendors' stalls set up wherever there was room were all doing a brisk business. Fabre had said that on the bridge you could have your dog barbered, hire an umbrella, join the army, buy a mackerel for supper, or a glass eye or wooden leg if a battle or duel turned out badly. Street criers carrying their wares were thick as the fog and Charles glimpsed a wild-eyed man in a tattered scholar's gown standing on a stool and proclaiming the virtues of ancient Greek comedy to a cluster of laughing students. Fog-blinded carriages hurtled across the bridge, making Charles grateful for the raised walkways. The ex-soldier led him off the bridge, past the clanging Samaritaine water pump that drew drinking water out of the Seine, and turned to the left.

“That's it,” the ex-soldier said. He pointed at the Louvre's bulk looming fitfully through the fog and quickened his pace. “Where Pierre lives.”

Charles stopped abruptly, with an unpleasant vision of yesterday's Gravel Voice and minions waiting for him to walk into a nicely set trap.

“What are you playing at?” he said harshly. “The Louvre's a palace.”

The man looked over his shoulder with a puzzled expression. “Of course it is. And Pierre lives there. Him and a few hundred more. They won't eat you. Probably won't even rob you, not with me there. Come on.” He vanished around a pile of broken stone and wood, thickly grown with weeds. “Watch yourself,” he called back. “The ground's full of holes.”

Following the often misunderstood Jesuit teaching that ends must be considered and means appropriately chosen, Charles pulled a long stave of weathered oak from the pile and followed the porter. He found himself in what could have been stage décor for hell. A freshening wind was thinning the fog, revealing pitted and broken ground. His guide led him across hard puddles of spilled mortar, past scattered rotten lumber. The remains of a flat-bottomed cargo boat lay like a skeleton amid the debris. As they neared the long colonnade ahead of them, Charles saw small fires flickering among the rubble and the smells of doubtful cooking assailed his nose. Grimy faces peered sullenly at them through the fog.

“What
is
all this?” Charles asked, keeping his voice low.

“What, never been here? Oh, well, I guess you wouldn't, would you? See that long part we're coming to?”

He pointed to the three-story colonnade that was revealing its full length as the fog blew away. Half of it looked more or less finished, though roofless. The unfinished half was covered with the remains of wooden scaffolding. Neither end of it seemed to be connected to anything.

“What happened was, see, the king started building, wanted to fancy up the place. But in '78, I think it was—around then, anyway—he tired of it. Turned his back on the whole thing and went off and built that Versailles. Just left all this. Which turned out a blessing, really, because a lot of people with no place to live moved into this side. Nice, some of it. Taverns, too. And there's a well. Even a garden, some of the women have.”

They reached the abandoned colonnade and Charles saw that the upper halves of the big windows in this south wall of the palace were glassless and boarded over. For warmth, he guessed. In a few places, the makeshift shutters on the lower part of the windows had been set aside to let in what light the morning offered, but oil lamps and candles flickered deep in the cavernous interior. Talk and laughter and arguing echoed as men and women went in and out. Ragged children raced along under the scaffolding, jumping up to hang from pieces of it and laughing uproariously when their rotten handholds broke. A huddle of barefoot women pushed past Charles, carrying hoes and baskets. Their eyes slid sideways at him and quickly away again.

“In here,” the ex-soldier said.

They went through a tall doorway without a door, into shadows thick with the smells of too many people in too little space. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Charles saw that there were partitions everywhere. These attempts at privacy counted for little, though, as his guide led him through room after makeshift room, one opening into the other. The first two smelled like chamber pots that hadn't been emptied since King Louis left, and Charles's shoes squelched unpleasantly on the floor. Then they crossed a cleaner room with most of a window to itself, where a hollow-cheeked young painter was re-creating Venus rising from the waves on the boards of his partition. In the room beyond Venus, a baby wailed. The ex-soldier beckoned Charles around the painter's partition and then held up a hand.

“Pierre's is next,” he said, over the baby's cries. “Wait here, I don't want to surprise him, not the way he's been acting.”

He left Charles staring uneasily at the screaming infant lying in a nest of rags beside three women sitting on the dirty parquet, under a slice of the window they shared with the painter. Beside them was a mound of paper. Their jaws worked ceaselessly and, as Charles watched, mystified, two of them spit wads of something into a basket. Then they passed a jug back and forth—vinegary wine, by the smell of it—crumbled some paper from their pile, stuffed it into their mouths, and started chewing again. The youngest, chewing steadily, shoved aside her unlaced stays to put the crying baby to her breast.

“Pardon me—um—
mesdames
,” Charles faltered, “but what are you doing?”

The two older women gazed at him like cud-chewing cows. But the youngest reared her head and glared at him defiantly. Then it hit him. Papier-mâché. Chewed paper. The tatty little Temple of Rhetoric was partly made of it, and so were the heads, hands, and feet of marionettes, so were theatre masks. But he'd never seen it made. He turned at the sound of hurrying feet.

“Come on!” The whites of the ex-soldier's eyes were showing. “We have to get out of here, move!”

“Why? Where's Pierre?”

“See for yourself, if you must! I'm having no more part of this!”

He took to his heels. The papier-mâché chewers followed him with their eyes and then looked back at Charles, as though they were watching a show with puppets they'd helped to make. Charles looked around the partition into the painter's room, in the direction his guide had gone, but the ex-soldier had already disappeared. The oblivious artist was still frowning from Venus to his palette.

Charles went quickly back through the paper chewers' den and into Pierre's room. Pierre lay on the far side of it, on a straw pallet under the uncovered half of a window. His eyes bulged and his face was dark with congested blood. Charles turned in a slow circle, taking in the makeshift brazier, the single dented cooking pot on its side on the floor. He made the sign of the cross, prayed briefly for the violently dispatched soul, and knelt beside the pallet. And froze, staring at the deep, patterned line around the porter's throat, a line that was the twin of the mark he'd seen on Philippe Douté's neck. Charles pulled gently up on the porter's arm. The body was already stiff. Lifting the thin blanket, he saw that the man was wearing only shirt and breeches and looked quickly around the room again. The old leather jerkin and cracked brown boots Pierre had worn yesterday were gone, along with his wooden carrying frame. A simple robbery, then? Not with that mark on his neck.

“You do have a way of showing up in time for murder, Maître du Luc.”

Charles leapt to his feet.

“Account for your presence here,” Lieutenant-Général La Reynie said. “And if you are foolish enough to use that stave you're holding under your cloak, you will no longer have a presence to account for.”

Without taking his eyes off Charles, the lieutenant-général stepped through the partition's opening. A thickset man, with a long, heavy pistol as well as a sword in his belt, came in behind La Reynie, eyeing Charles with happy anticipation. Charles dropped the piece of wood and held out his empty hands.

“I am no threat,
messieurs.
And I know no more of this dead man than you do.”

Probably a great deal less than they did, he thought, watching them ignore Pierre's body as though it were old news.

“I somehow doubt that.”

“I might also ask what you are doing here, Lieutenant-Général La Reynie.”

“Following you, Maître du Luc, what else?”

The words hit Charles like a mailed fist. “I am a member of a religious house,
monsieur
,” he said furiously, “and you have no evidence whatever that I am involved in this! The body is already stiff, he must have been killed hours ago. I have been here only a matter of minutes.”

“Yes, but you talked to him yesterday. And whether you spent all of last night on your hard Jesuit bed, I couldn't say. By the time I learned about this body and put two men outside Louis le Grand, you could have been back inside the college. As for threatening me with your invisible little Jesuit tonsure, the king's writ runs everywhere. The old days of immunity for clerics in Paris ended a dozen years ago. Though I get arguments about that,” La Reynie added sourly, waving his hand impatiently at the officer hovering beside Charles.

The man grinned evilly. “Turn around.”

Knowing that resistance would get him nowhere he wanted to go, Charles turned to the wall. Swiftly, expertly, and impertinently, the man searched him to the skin. He tossed Charles's small purse of coins to La Reynie.

La Reynie caught it. “Now go to the outside door and keep everyone out.”

Charles turned around. La Reynie watched his officer out of sight and hefted the nearly flat purse in his hand.

“Did you perhaps rob our friend here, Maître du Luc?”

“Oh, yes,” Charles drawled, “there is so much wealth in this miserable stinkhole, I hardly knew where to begin.”

“Pity. Then we are back where we started. Why are you here?”

Charles forced himself to swallow his anger. “You know that Philippe Douté's little brother was ridden down in the street. This poor soul saw the accident. I wanted to ask him about it, to satisfy the child's father about what happened. That's all.”

La Reynie went to the pallet and looked down at the dead man. “Very interesting that this man was killed in the same way as Philippe.”

Charles said nothing.

“Pierre Foret,” La Reynie went on thoughtfully, watching Charles. “Quay porter. Sometime pickpocket. Nose smashed in a tavern brawl two years ago, so my sergeant who searched you tells me. Not a bad sort, Pierre, as his sort goes.” He suddenly tossed Charles the purse. “On your own admission, you were the last to see Philippe alive and—”

“Except for his killer.”

“—and you found his body. And now I find you here, standing over this man who was strangled in the same way as Philippe.”

“Search me again.” Charles held his arms out at his sides. “I have nothing that would make that kind of mark.” He let his arms fall. “But that wouldn't keep you from arresting me, would it? You and Louvois don't need evidence. You destroy whom you please.”