Cezanne's Quarry (19 page)

Cézanne gave a listless shrug. Sometime after they returned from their vacation on the Seine. A week or two ago, he mumbled. He could not remember. He kept shaking his head, his protests growing less and less audible.

“So what you are telling me is that you don’t know where you were on the afternoon and evening of August 17. That your violent paintings had nothing to do with Solange Vernet. You claim that you had nothing to do with the murders, and you have no idea who did.” Martin wanted to impress upon Cézanne all the gaping holes in his testimony.

“Right, right, right.” Cézanne kept shaking his head.

“Well, I will be questioning your”—
mistress? wife?
—“Mme Fiquet again. For now, let me talk with my inspector before I decide what I will do with you.” Martin got up and stepped around his desk. He looked down at the artist. “If we decide to let you go, you must not say a word to anyone about the rape or about the boy. We do not want to start a general panic.”

Cézanne met his gaze. “Who would I want to tell about all this? Who
could
I tell?” Finally he said, “You have my word.”

“And you realize that if you leave Aix this time, you could bankrupt your entire family.”

The artist shook his head. “I’ll stay here until you catch him. Don’t worry.” He appeared to be thoroughly beaten down.

Joseph’s chair scraped against the wooden floor. Martin had no doubt his clerk was relieved the interview was over. He had been struggling mightily to keep up with the artist’s outbursts. Martin left his chambers, still not sure what he was going to do next. Perhaps he was being naïve, but he believed Cézanne was telling the truth, if only because he did not even attempt to cover his tracks. Yet he had an explosive temper. And the scrap of canvas from the quarry, the violent pictures, and the missing gloves, which might well be stained with tell-tale paint, made him a prime suspect.

This is what Martin told Franc as they huddled in the corridor out of the hearing of the family. The most compelling reason to hold Cézanne would be if they considered him to be dangerous. But to whom? They already had Westerbury in jail, and they’d send word to Arlette LaFarge not to let the artist into the Vernet apartment. Either because Westerbury was his favorite suspect, or because he did not want to tangle with a rich, important family, Franc was uncharacteristically amenable to the least drastic course of action. He promised to have one of his men keep an eye on Cézanne and agreed to release him.

Martin watched the artist pause at the door of his chambers, contemplating the familial gauntlet. The mother and father were still huddled together on the bench. Across from them, standing by the railing, the two sisters and brother-in-law waited anxiously. Finally, Paul Cézanne put on his cap and went to his father, offering his arm. As he helped the old man to his feet, Conil stepped toward them. Martin heard Cézanne grumble, “We’ll talk later.” When the lawyer opened his mouth to say something, Cézanne repeated, “Later!” He pushed past his brother-in-law and, with his father leaning on him, led the silent procession down the stairs to their privileged exit through the main door. Cézanne held his head up high, just as Westerbury had done. Despite himself, Martin felt a little sorry for him, as he had for the Englishman.

“Humph.” That was Franc’s reaction, as he stepped back into Martin’s office. He had no soft-hearted concern for the weak. And he was undoubtedly right. One should not waste pity on murder suspects.

They agreed that Martin should spend the afternoon writing orders to get as many members of Solange Vernet’s salon as possible into his chambers the next day, and that Franc should continue to question Westerbury about the letter, the note, the weapon, and the gloves. Martin hoped that Franc would not be brutal, but he no longer gave a damn about the Englishman who had proved himself to be an accomplished liar.

Before Franc left, Martin turned down the inspector’s invitation to join him at Chez l’Arlésienne for dinner. Instead, he sent Joseph out for sandwiches. Official work, at his desk, always put Martin on an even keel. It kept fatigue and discouragement at bay. Later he would go over again and again in his mind all that had transpired in the last few days. He would try to understand how the rage and pain in one throbbing human heart had led to two murders. What Martin had no way of knowing is how much his own heart would be tested that night.

“
IT’S ME, BROTHER.”

The only one who called Martin “brother” was his old schoolmate, Jean-Jacques Merckx.

“Jean-Jacques?”

A shadow emerged from the corner. “Yes, Jean-Jacques,” he answered in a tone heavy with sarcasm. He had caught the fear and hesitation in Martin’s voice.

What else could Merckx expect? He had been Martin’s best friend, the only other scholarship student at Xavier. But ever since leaving school, his reappearances had brought trouble, demands that Martin could not possibly fulfill, yet could not refuse—demands for money, for help, for support and approval of his radical political activities. What would he want this time?

“Let me have a look at you.” As Martin reached for the oil lamp on his table, Merckx edged away, toppling the chair and falling onto the bed.

“Not by the window, and close the door.”

After securing the latch and righting the chair, Martin held the light over his friend, who sat on the bed with his back against the wall. Merckx looked worse than ever. Thinner and dirtier. Even in childhood, his watery blue eyes had been rimmed with dark circles. Now they sank back into his head, duller and more distant. There was a smell, too, of sweat and desperation and, when Merckx began to snicker, an odor of sickness and neglect.

He noticed Martin cringe. “A bad conscience always smells bad, don’t you think, Brother Bernard? And I am, as always, condemned to be your conscience.” His voice was as harsh and hectoring as ever.

“What do you want?” Martin asked, the anger rising in him.

“I need help.”

Martin put the lamp on the table and sat down. This could be disastrous. His heart began to pound.

“I thought you were in the army.” He barely got the words out.

“I am . . . or was.”

Merckx never asked for anything directly. He always wanted Martin to pull it out of him, to prove his friendship. Martin hated this game, but knew it was necessary. Every other boy at Xavier had ridiculed Merckx because of his ill-fitting clothes, his dirty corn-yellow hair, and his Flemish accent. Most of all, they had scorned him because he was the sickly progeny of the workers their own parents employed and exploited. They had given Martin a hard time too. But at least his relatives were “respectable.” So were his demeanor and attitudes—too respectable, according to Merckx, who never hesitated to point out the hypocrisies of the rich and pious.

Merckx coughed, as if to signal that it was Martin’s turn to speak.

“Are you on leave?” Hope against hope.

“Don’t you wish, monsieur le juge.”

Martin could hardly breathe. “You have deserted, then?” That was it. A lawbreaker, a traitor, in his own room. Martin rose above his companion, fists clenched. “What have you done?” He couldn’t take the pleading out of his voice, even though it might bring down a shower of scorn. Merckx knew that as an officer of the court it was his duty to report a desertion. Why had Merckx come
here
?

“That’s why I need help.” Merckx had dropped the mocking tone. He knew full well what he was asking.

“But you told me you could get through your service. You said you’d be among men like yourself. Peasants. Workers. People you could talk to.” Martin was glad he had not turned the lamp up high. Tears of frustration rushed to his eyes.

Merckx spit on the floor. “With the officers on my neck all the time! You don’t know what it’s like. You got exempted because you were in law school and because you were mommy’s only son. But believe me, they’re no different from the Jesuits. Except they don’t only rap you on the knuckles when you’re insubordinate. Oh no. The great Republican army throws you in solitary. Or makes you stand at attention for hours at a time in the sun until you fall down, so they can kick you back up again. Until you can’t take it any more.” His voice rose with emotion.

Martin put his hand to his mouth to signal quiet. The window was wide open.

“How did you find me?”

“I went to the Palais. I asked around. Everyone seems to know the young judge.”

Martin sank down into the chair again. It was worse than he had feared.

“Don’t worry, I was careful.”

Martin stared out his window at the darkening sky. Merckx, careful? Merckx, who made it a point to insult Martin’s “bourgeois” friends, even his mother? Thank God the Proc and the other judges were out of town. He desperately wanted to know who Merckx had spoken to. If Martin were lucky, it might have been Old Joseph, who barely remembered his own name, and who had a certain loyalty to his “young judge.” But it more likely had been one of the gendarmes, whose loyalties were only to Franc.

“I told you I was careful. No reason to worry. I told you.”

Martin got up and ran his hands through his hair. Merckx had an uncanny ability to read his mind. Had he become that predictable, that bourgeois? He had always helped Merckx before. But this? Asking him to abet desertion? This. Martin started to pace.

“Tell me what you want.”

“Right now, the rest of your wine, while you consider whether or not you will step off your pedestal and come to the aid of an old friend.”

Martin handed Merckx a half-empty bottle from his table and continued to circle the small space in front of the bed. What
he
really wanted was for Merckx to disappear, that he not be forced to make a choice between the law and his friend.

Making choices and taking risks had always been a part of their friendship, from the very beginning when Merckx forced Martin into his one true act of moral and physical courage. It had happened about a year after his father’s death, and it had bound them together forever. Jean-Jacques had once again challenged Father Campion’s lessons in morality. Called in front of the class for the usual punishment of three strokes, he refused to apologize. Perhaps worse, he refused to cry out. The rod came down on his hands again and again. Martin winced at the memory. He thought he had heard bones crack. And still Merckx stood there, silent, tears trailing white streaks down his perpetually dirty face.

“Stop! Stop!” Martin had shouted. And when Father Campion persisted, he had run to the front of the room and grabbed the priest’s arm. “Stop!”

This had earned Martin his first punishment of six strokes. He had tried to stay as silent as Merckx, and kept telling himself that he had done right, that he had brought the priest to his senses by diverting him away from the poor, incorrigible boy. Afterwards, as his mother tenderly salved his hands, she admonished him to listen to his superiors. He always wondered what his father would have said to him. Martin smiled to himself. What would Franc have said? Would he have given him a lecture on watching out for oneself, or admired Martin’s audacity?

Merckx had said nothing, and he certainly had never thanked Martin. He would never recognize anyone else in that class as being as courageous as he. But he had befriended Martin and shown him an entirely new world: a world where whole families cooked, slept, and propagated in a single room in tottering wooden buildings; a world where merit was measured not by wealth, education, or piety, but by loyalty and solidarity—and by a distrust of the rich. What a different view Merckx had given him of the DuPonts. Merckx taught him that his benefactors made the money that funded their “charities” by exploiting women and children. His mother and sisters worked fourteen hours a day on DuPont’s loud, clanking, dusty looms, which never stopped for any reason. What Martin remembered most vividly is that in Merckx’s world everyone coughed. The women wheezed out the brown detritus of the woolen mills, while the men spat out the coal-black dirt of the mines. And Merckx himself, it seemed, had been born coughing. That’s why they let him go to school. They had ceded their weakest child to the bourgeoisie and the Church, in the hope that he might somehow survive.

Now Merckx sat on Martin’s bed, doubled over, his hacking cough worse than ever. What did Martin really owe Merckx? His sense of justice? His vocation? If that were so, he had certainly never been able to live up to his friend’s standards. Merckx denounced him for going to law school, mocked his choice of the magistrature, and, during their last angry encounter in Paris, even berated him for “exploiting” a working-class girl, the ever-willing Honorine. If he hadn’t been so frightened, Martin might have enjoyed the irony of his situation. Maybe Merckx
had
become his conscience, a confessor more fearsome than anything the Church had ever produced.

And maybe Merckx was the only thing keeping him from the complacency of a slow, predictable climb up the ladder in the civil service. Maybe Merckx was his one true friend.

As he watched Merckx struggling to sit upright on the bed, Martin knew that he would never give him up. Merckx was everything, everyone that Martin hoped to protect in his chambers: the poor, the suffering, those who struggled merely to survive. Like Arlette, Martin thought, and like the boy he had seen this morning, who had unwittingly sacrificed his life for a pittance.

As their eyes met, Martin spoke. “I can’t keep you here. The landlord and his family are returning tomorrow. If you decide to go back, I can help you.”

“I can’t. Don’t you understand? They’ll send me to Devil’s Island this time.”

They both knew what that meant. More beatings, and a slow, rotting death in the hot sun thousands of miles away from everything Merckx had ever known. There was really nothing else for Martin to do. He asked, “What do you need?”

“Not much, just enough to keep on going.”

“But where? You are in no condition—”

“I’ve made it this far. When I get there, they’ll take care of me.”

“Who?”

“My
real
brothers.”