A case of curiosities (34 page)

"If you want to know all about it, buy me a jug and sit by my side," the man said. Claude morosely accepted the request. Between quaffs, the drunk described what had happened.

At the end of a windy Sunday night and in the early morning hours of the next day, the main chimney in the house of Daniel Grisard, the dull-witted neighbor of the Pages, caught fire, something chimneys are not supposed to do but do nevertheless. The cause was not known. Arson? Divine wrath? An inattentive kitchenmaid? The kitchenmaid was the suspect most often invoked since Christine, the pyromaniac, was visiting an aunt in Grand-le-Luc. A general alarm went out. What should have involved routine intervention by a bucket brigade was encumbered by the presence of a water hose imported from Neuchatel, a contraption no one could operate. Bystanders soon started to respond haphazardly. One fellow spilled a barrel of brandy on the edge of the blaze, which only spread the fire. Grisard, idiot that he was, had stored thirty pounds of gunpowder for the protection of his property, a measure that proved less than protective. Bits of fiery debris shot out in every direction. The explosion was further abetted by the large vats of cooking oil Madame Grisard had kept as a hedge against the long winters. The residents, having exhausted all individual efforts at fire fighting, organized themselves finally into a chain between the river and the blaze. They passed buckets, tiny barrels, and cups of water from hand to hand. Most of the water splashed out of the containers before it ever reached the flames. Just as the community was coordinating its efforts, the Vengeful Widow struck, whipping the fire into a frenzy that forced everyone to retreat and watch helplessly from the edges. The drunk explained that Claude's family could have escaped the blaze easily had it not been for the choking mix of burning herbal medicines hanging from the rafters.

Claude grabbed at a nearby jug and drank deeply, not because he wanted to drink but because it seemed to be the expected response. Piero found him a few hours later, close to stupor. The Venetian was trying to carry Claude out the door when their path was blocked. Even with a substantial quantity of mediocre wine impairing his senses, Claude recognized the small old man with bushy brows who smiled meekly and sneezed. But before Claude could respond, he passed out.

WHEN HE AWOKE, bedclothes over his head, Claude found he was suffering a generalized queasiness that recalled the night of intemperance in the hands of the fairy-tale whore. Now, however, his nausea was augmented by the profound disorientation that comes from sleeping in an unknown bed. He resisted pulling off the sheets. Inside the fabric enclosure, protected from the world beyond, Claude warmed himself with his own acrid breath. He did not know where he was, so he played a kind of childish guessing game, trying to establish his relationship to the wall, to the rest of the room, to the rest of the world. Then, suddenly, he remembered the fire and the Red Dog account of his family's fate. He remembered the drinking and Piero's intervention. He remembered the distinctive sneeze.

Claude clutched his testicles. He tried to push out the distress of his family loss but could not. He removed the covers from his head and found he was lying in the pallet bed of the mansion house, the intellectual domus of his youth, the residence of Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Robert Auget, Abbe, Chevalier of the Royal Order of Elephants, Count of Tournay. Claude's first thought was this: I have returned to the house of a murderer.

He rose from the pallet quickly. Piero was asleep in an adjacent bed. It was so cold that he could see his breath. He wrapped the sheets around himself and walked over to the window, pushed open the shutters, and looked out into the courtyard. He discovered that, as he had predicted, snow had fallen during the night. And it was not an equivocal or rogue storm. It was to be the first of many fierce onslaughts. Winter had staked its claim. He squinted at the thermometer bolted to the sash. The mercury had dropped into the ball of an instrument that had been graduated to four degrees below zero. Claude was struck by a morbid realization. The ground had frozen, thus making it impossible for his mother and two sisters to be buried. The undertaker would need mining equipment, a lantern wheel, to break through, and since no such machinery could be brought to the cemetery, the community would have to wait for the thaw to see their dead interred.

Emerging from the bedroom, Claude avoided the voices that echoed off the mansion-house walls. He stayed away from the kitchen and the chapel, entering the storerooms instead. They were deserted, empty even of the pigment bottles. He walked into the laboratory and closed his eyes. Another childish game: he tried to guess the disposition of the objects in the room and recall the theorems associated with each, the mnemonic exercise the Abbe had taught him long before. When Claude opened his eyes, he was shocked by the desolation. Most of the sophisticated instruments of research — the old screw-barrel microscope, for example, and the newer pneumatic pump — were no longer there. The dust, he noticed, was qualitatively different from the dust he remembered. It was the product of disuse, rather than inattention. The chaos was old and tired. In the library, cobwebs spanned the untouched pyramids of books.

Claude walked outside. He circled the lightning pole. It had rusted and lost its conductor. He entered the dovecote. It was silent, uninhabited except by two field mice huddled against the cold. He pivoted the ladder that moved around the interior of the building and remembered hunting for saltpeter with the Abbe. He left and climbed the mansion-house turret. Reaching the top, he looked out through the lancet opening to an orchard of abandoned pear trees, then over to the village, where a black smudge marked the path of the fire. He gripped a shutter latch and traced the track worn away in the embrasure. Again a flood of memories returned: of his childhood, of his training and subsequent terror, of his flight from the building in which he now stood.

The cold caught up with him, and he sought the comfort of a fire. He descended the spiral stairwell, passed through the courtyard, and returned to the main building. He was halfway into the library, shivering violently, when he heard a sneeze.

The Abbe suddenly poppled forward and said hello. In the awkward silence that followed, Claude observed his former mentor with the attention of a copybook artist. The old man's eyebrows, which had always been bushy, now expanded outward like frontal horns. Fuzz had sprouted on his nose, where a pair of cracked and grimy Nurembergs (in the past, used only for reading and close observation) now found permanent residence. Behind the glasses, eyes that had once fired bright and blue were murky. The hair on his head had turned as white as Cyprus thread.

"Yes," the Abbe said, as if to answer Claude's visual interrogation. "I have aged, rather quickly, I fear. My hearing, my strength, my vision — all reduced. The Hours suffered after you left. I tried to take over your tasks. I managed for a while. But when I started to paint nipples on thighs, I knew it was time to stop." The salacious comment was made to put Claude at ease, but Claude was reluctant to acknowledge it.

The Abbe took reticence as a sign of grief. He gestured to the coffin-confessional, the mansion house's most memorable piece of furniture. It was missing the lower half. "I thought it right to use the coffin for its original purpose. Your sister, the younger one, Evangeline, looks very peaceful in it, I think. Besides, gout was making it difficult for me to enter."

The Abbe asked Claude for the bottle of Tokay resting on the mantel. "Do not tell Marie-Louise. She has me on a regimen that would starve a starling." After the previous night's excesses, Claude declined to share a drink or even talk, but he did pull a stool near the fire. For a while, the Abbe spoke around what truly mattered. He made no mention of Claude's abrupt departure. His words buffeted about like a maple leaf floating on a windswept pond. He handed Claude a piece of preserved fruit. "One of Kleinhoff's final gatherings. He died more than a year ago. Until the end, we argued about his grafts. He wanted to grow a good christian. As you might remember, I refused the cultivation of religious fruits for the longest time. But old age softened me, and so we settled on a grafting of magdalenes. That last season allowed us to line the cellar wall, the long one, with jar after jar of pears in heavy syrup. I told Kleinhoff just before he died that he had been right to graft the magdalenes. A redeemed harlot is better than a good christian."

Finally, Claude spoke. "She, at least, reformed herself." He poked at the fire. "I wonder if others in the mansion house have paid equal penance." This was Claude's way of invoking the attack on Madame Dubois.

"What?" the Abbe shouted. "Hold on. I need my trumpet." He picked up a large seashell tipped in copper. It left his ear-hole green.

Claude repeated himself, and the Abbe, still not grasping the words, or feigning as much, replied, "Yes, the wasps were terrible. They destroyed all the finer trees just as they were coming into fruit."

Claude made another foray. "The wasps are not the only ones who destroy things of beauty."

The Abbe changed the subject. "How is Paris?"

"Difficult, brutal," Claude yelled. "I will tell you of an observation I made a month or so after I reached the city. I was very homesick at the time and walked around the fowl market to remind myself of Tournay. I gave up when I saw the sellers grab the birds and squeeze half-digested vetch from their gullets. I asked the fowl inspector about the regulations, and he just laughed at me. That, I realized, is Paris. You are not allowed to eat a meal unless you are to be served up at someone's table."

"And are you still served up at the table of Lucien Livre? I imagine he has difficulty digesting you and your interests."

"Livre? No. I no longer work for him." Claude provided the Abbe with a brief description of his tenure at the Globe, going so far as to mention Alexandra Hugon and the Portrait in Little. "You may recall the commission that Livre brought us just before my departure." The last word stuck in Claude's throat like vetch.

"I do not recollect the commission. There were so many. The departure, of course, is another matter."

Now it was Claude's turn to sidestep the subject. "I took the piece with me when I left."

"If you did, I never missed it. And how did you learn of the fire?"

"Through Livre."

"I am surprised he would have bothered to be of service after you left his employ."

"He is extremely attentive when pain is to be dispensed. It comforts him to know that there are others who suffer as much as he."

"A true moralist when it comes to misfortune."

Contempt for Livre brought the two slightly closer. Claude resumed his talk about Alexandra. The Abbe, listening through the ear trumpet, learned of the seduction, the liaison, and the ecclesiastical trial of impotence. He was particularly interested in the trial. "Trust a committee of chaste priests to assess the perversions and crimes of sexual neglect. It recalls the meticulous work of Father Sanchez, who queried: 'Did the Virgin Mary emit semen in the course of her relations with the Holy Spirit?'

Claude confessed his anguish at the break with Alexandra. "She abused my love. She abandoned me. That is impossible to forget."

"I, too, Claude, have felt such abuse, though never from a woman."

Claude could no longer control himself. "That is not true. It was just such problems that drove me from the mansion house."

"What do you mean?"

"I am referring to Madame Dubois. Have you forgotten?"

"Oh, her. She meant nothing. I told you that then. She was an amatorculus . A little insignificant lover. She was not a true passion."

"All the worse."

"I don't think your difficulties with Alexandra and mine with Madame Dubois offer profitable parallel. Your links were formed out of love, mine out of diversion. Dubois was what collectors of curiosa during the last century called ein Kurzweil. A pastime. Though, admittedly, a troublesome one."

"And so you disposed of her when she no longer satisfied you."

"What do you expect? She failed me. It was as much my fault as hers, of course. Still, I don't see why you adopt such an outraged stance. What I did with Madame Dubois I did for you. If you knew of my frustrations, you would understand."

"I would not understand."

"Oh, yes, you would. I will show you. I have her in a box behind the reredos."

"The scene of the murder."

"I don't know what you mean, but come, take a look." The Abbe got up from his chair. "Bring the trumpet and the Tokay." He walked over to the appropriate shelf and pushed the little lozenge that opened the passage to the chapel. Once there, he took Claude behind the screen without delay.

"My final chamber. I would have shown you sooner had you not run away."

"And I would not have run away had you treated your Kurzweil more tenderly."

The Abbe did not hear him, separated as he was from the trumpet. He bent down and scrounged around in some boxes. The room was only slightly less disordered than the rest of the mansion house, and whatever magic it had once contained was now hidden under dust. The Abbe finally found Madame Dubois. "Here she is, or part of her." He rose, visibly annoyed. He sucked his teeth in disgust. "This is a nuisance. Come take a look. Worms have bored through an eyehole, and grubs have nested in her hair."

Claude looked, and his reaction to the eyehole and hair and the rest of the jumble was shock — shock that forced him to reassess his actions and those of the Abbe and forced him to reassess his life and the life of the Abbe. All of which he did in the moment just before he screamed out with a force that did not require the Abbe to use his trumpet.

"But she was not real!" Claude shouted. "Madame Dubois!"

The Watch

She was NOT real!" Claude shouted a second time, with only slightly less force.

"She most certainly was," the Abbe replied, taking a sip of Tokay. "Not made of blood and bone, perhaps, but real inasmuch as wood and brass and ivory are real."