Pure (26 page)

‘All that work stewing our exhumed friends,’ says Armand, ‘has quite exhausted the old fellow. It exhausts me just thinking about it.’

‘Is this sausage edible?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. He takes a piece, puts it in his mouth. Pork and pork fat hard as money.

Armand shuts his book of music. He turns in the chair and watches the engineer, watches him chew and eventually swallow.

‘You find me so interesting?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘Interesting? You know very well I have found you so from the moment you walked into my church. I confess I am intrigued to see what your surgeon has achieved.’

‘You mean Guillotin?’

‘I mean Ziguette Monnard. I fancy she has finished you off.’

Along the length of Jean-Baptiste’s wound the stitches briefly tighten. ‘It is what she intended,’ he says.

‘Ah, but you were in need of something, my friend. You were not quite hatched . . . And is that not a new suit you have? Have you seen it, Jeanne? Black as midnight! Bravo! He has at last revealed himself as the good Calvinist I have always suspected him of being. You know his mother is of that persuasion?’

‘My
mother
. . .’ begins Jean-Baptiste, speaking to the stone floor between his feet, ‘my mother . . .’ He falls silent. He is in no mood for Armand’s games, in no condition to play them. He finishes the second bowl of coffee, rouses himself and goes upstairs to look in on Manetti, sits a while beside the sleeping man, then, coming down the stairs, suffers an instant of giddiness and only saves himself from tumbling by snatching at the rail.

‘You have done enough for now,’ says Armand, taking him firmly by the arm and walking him outside. ‘The cemetery is yours still. Poor Lecoeur was in a panic without you.’

‘I should speak to him . . .’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Tomorrow will be soon enough.’

‘I shall come in the morning.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ says Armand.

‘And in my working suit, if I can find it.’

‘We shall be ready for you. I will even attempt not to tease you for a day or two.’ He smiles.

‘When it happened,’ says Jean-Baptiste, speaking quickly and quietly and looking over Armand’s shoulder at the arches of the south charnel, ‘when she struck me . . . afterwards, I mean, there were some moments before I became insensible. Very few, I think, but enough. I wished to . . . hold something. Some idea. I believed I was dying, you see. I wished for something to make the moment possible.’

‘And what did you find?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

On the rue aux Fers, grey light, grey stone; the black forms of birds on the steep roofs. To his left, the corner of the rue de la Lingerie, to his right, the rue Saint-Denis. By the fountain, a dog, skinny, pared down, is lapping at a puddle. Sensing itself observed, it looks up, water dripping from its muzzle, then turns, limps into the rue Saint-Denis, pauses a moment as if to see which half of the world beckoned it, and goes north towards the faubourg.

The engineer trails after it, enters the street’s stream, stands there clumsily, immediately in everybody’s way. He cannot see the animal any more but does not need to. He knows what he will do now, though for a man who has prided himself on possessing a trained and shadowless mind it feels uncomfortably like a descent into ritual magic. He will walk up the rue Saint-Denis. He will circle round to the church of Saint-Eustache. He will follow, as best he is able, the route he took the night he went painting with Armand and his fellow waifs, the night he found himself alone in the mist with Héloïse. He will follow the route and so discover her again and deliver his message – whatever the message is. He has not yet dressed it in words but surely, once she is standing in front of him, it will pour out of his mouth like the Holy Ghost.

He sets off through a cloud of seamstresses, noisy, red-cheeked girls heading towards the river after twelve hours on their benches squinting at needles. On the rue Saint-Denis, it is the fat hour when work is briefly suspended and there is a chance to look up and wring a little pleasure from a scrap of winter’s evening. Djeco’s wine shop is already full. A pair of porters lounge against the wall outside like Spanish gallants in the Age of Gold. Foundry men, flower-girls, shoe-blacks, stick-sellers, beggars, fiddlers, writers-for-hire – if any among them notice the engineer, the wounded white intensity of his face, and are, for a stride or two, amused or unsettled, they are soon swept past to new distractions. He, certainly, is mostly oblivious to them, would be entirely so were it not for the occasional shoulder-check from some man or woman hurrying in the counterflow. He is looking ahead, as far ahead as he can, looking and trying not to give in to the growing suspicion that all this – what he is doing here – is no more than one of those effects, unpredictable and of long duration, Dr Guillotin warned him of. And then, having walked no more than three hundred metres from the fountain, a movement of red – purple almost in this light – stops him dead, then starts him again at a quicker pace.

Unsettling to have found her so easily! To not have the time to walk off the last of his giddiness, to gather himself. Unsettling to think that magic might work . . .

She is too far ahead to call to, and moving in the same northward direction as himself. For a whole minute he loses sight of her, his view obscured by a pair of ambling packhorses; then he spies her again, standing by the window of a shop, her face close to the glass. He knows the place, has passed it a score of times. They sell those things, those – love of Christ, he has one on his own head! – but the ones for women, for women and girls. Ribbons and so on, scoops, coloured feathers . . .

‘Héloïse!’

He has called too soon; his voice does not quite carry, though the woman behind him, one of those prematurely aged market crones with a figure like a herring barrel, has heard him clearly enough and mimics him surprisingly well, the plaintive, husky tone: ‘Oh HELO-ISE!’

He looks round at her, more confused than angry. Who is she? Does he know her?

‘Eh, Queenie!’ shouts another woman, sister-creature of the first. ‘Can’t you see the gentleman wants you?’

But still she has not heard them, still she stares in at the shop window, oblivious of the scene moving up the street towards her.

‘She don’t want to make her basket-weaver jealous,’ says a third. ‘Or the old bookseller. Or your old man!’

‘My old man so much as looked at her, I’d serve him his balls for dinner.’

Now
she turns, watches them, holds her ground as they approach. Whatever she is feeling – anger, fear, astonishment – she is careful to keep all sign of it out of her face. The engineer stops a metre and a half, perhaps two metres from her.

‘He’s lost his tongue,’ says the first woman.

‘It’s not his tongue he’ll want,’ says the second, laughing at her own wit.

‘It’s
him
,’ says a man’s voice, a shaggy head leaning from the window of an unlit room in the house next to the shop. ‘The one digging up les Innocents.’

‘You sure?’

‘ ’Course I’m bloody sure. Look at him.’

‘Expect he wants a bit of what his workers are getting,’ says another voice, female, younger than the others.

‘I was looking for you,’ says Jean-Baptiste to Héloïse. ‘I wished . . . to speak with you.’ At the mention of speaking, the audience bursts into delighted laughter.

‘You got to show her the colour of your money, dear. Bless him. He must be new to it all.’

‘And what about the Monnard girl?’ asks the younger voice. ‘Gone off her, have you?’

Héloïse, who has not once allowed her gaze to be drawn towards anyone other than the engineer, grants him now four or five seconds in which to make everything right. He breathes; he frowns; he opens his mouth. ‘Hats,’ he says. ‘How could I have forgotten hats?’

She makes the slightest of nods; then, very calmly, as if none of it had anything to do with her, as if it was just some nonsense she had happened upon and which now she had lost all interest in, she turns away and continues her progress up the street.

The man in the window leans further out. ‘Hats!’ he screams. ‘Did you hear him? He said, “Hats”! Hats!’

It is only a step or two to the window from where Jean-Baptiste is standing. He goes to it, goes quickly before the man has any chance to react. He takes a fistful of the man’s hair, pulls his head down hard against the narrow sill. In his other hand he has the key to the cemetery. He presses the tip against the man’s throat, a soft place just below the jaw.

‘Who do I look like to you?’ he asks, his voice quiet, almost conversational. ‘Who do I look like to
you
?’

In the time to come – when there will be cause to speak of such things – the man will say he saw bloody murder in those grey eyes, will insist on it and be listened to. Whatever he sees, it is enough to silence him. Even the women are discomfited. The show is over. They melt away, each to her own small circumstance. Within a minute the engineer stands quite by himself.

2

At his next meeting with Monsieur Lafosse – three days after the events on the rue Saint-Denis – Jean-Baptiste offers his resignation. He is quite clear about it. He no longer wishes to be the director of works at the cemetery of les Innocents. He wants nothing to do with les Innocents. He wishes to go somewhere else, do something different. He is, after all, an engineer: he knows that much. He should attempt to employ himself more appropriately.

Lafosse, who never sits during these encounters in the Monnards’ drawing room, waits for the younger man to finish what he has to say, then tells him that resigning is a recourse open to people of some importance in the world and that he, the engineer, is not such a person. He, the engineer, is in fact a type of servant and not even a particularly senior type of servant. A servant who was taken on at the minister’s pleasure. A servant who will be released when the minister has no further use for him. Those are the terms. To abuse them would be to destroy utterly any hope of future advancement. It is, perhaps, more pathetic than amusing that the engineer had not understood all this.

‘So I must remain here? I have no choice but to remain?’

‘Bravo, monsieur. You have grasped the essential fact. And now, if you would permit me to continue with what I have taken the trouble to come here and discuss with you?’

What Lafosse has come to discuss – though between them there is never anything that might be mistaken for a discussion – is the news that the quarry at the Porte d’Enfer is finally ready for its first consignment from the cemetery. His Grace the Bishop has scattered holy water in the vaults and passages where the bones will be stored. The carts will travel at night, accompanied by priests from the seminary at Saint-Louis. Throughout the journey the priests will pray aloud in strong voices. There will be incense, pitch torches, black velvet. Everything is to reflect the concern, the Catholic decency of the minister . . .

‘And may I inform the minister,’ says Lafosse, ‘that your health is now quite recovered? That there will be no repetition of such adventures?’

He makes no comment on the engineer’s new black coat, a coat somehow a shade or two blacker than his own.

3

Dinner with the Monnards. A cabbage stuffed with capers. Veal kidneys cooked in wine. Pumpkin tart.

Monsieur and Madame eat in a state of exquisite discomfort. The engineer, for whom all food has now become simply a matter of volume, mass, elasticity, surface texture, degrees of aridity, just eats. Marie is blooming.

4

The night of 9 March, just after eleven by the engineer’s watch, a convoy of carts – solid, capacious vehicles built to haul stone – is ready to leave for the Pont Neuf and the quarry. It took more than three hours to load them, though in the cemetery the bone walls look much as they did before. As for the crypts and the attics of bones above the galleries, these they have not even touched.

The horses wait patiently in their traces. Now and then one scrapes a hoof over the cobbles. The priests are pale, rehearsed, young, competitively pious. They grip their flambeaux, glance at their neighbours, glance at the carts with their velvet-draped loads.

‘Let us hope these fellows have good boots,’ says Armand. ‘By the time this is over they will have walked to the moon and back.’

Twenty, thirty onlookers have gathered on the far side of the rue de la Ferronnerie. There has not been much, until now, for people to look at. The smoke of the fires, the weekly appearance of the miners, like sailors on furlough in a foreign port, eyes full of uneasy knowledge. But now there is this, a procession with carts and fire, and priests in their long, brass-buttoned coats. The first undeniable evidence of the end of les Innocents! The first removal. There is – there has been – no protest, no lament. Whatever loyalty people still feel for this patch of foul ground, no one, with the exception of Ziguette Monnard, has bothered to raise a hand to save it.

At the last moment, when everything is ready and the performance is about to commence, Père Colbert appears. He blunders through the cemetery door, shoves his bulk between Armand and Jean-Baptiste, glares at them from behind his tinted glasses, glares at the young priests. From the hands of one of them he snatches a torch, then stamps to the front of the procession and plants himself at its head.