The Judas Cloth (81 page)

Blount thought they should approach the gaol from another direction. He had lost his hat, had blood on his jacket and smelled unusually high for an English gentleman. Nicola guessed that he too had a gamy tang. His clothes were sticking to him and the unaccustomed trousers felt tight around his crotch. As they moved off, the sniper fire grew fiercer and the marines retreated. The officer told them that the prison was unreachable for now.

‘But,’ asked Blount, ‘might the Communards not burn it?’

The officer shrugged. ‘We’ll go in when we can.’

The sun had now set but a persistent radiance in the sky suggested that it might re-arise. Tomorrow was Whitsun, the feast when the Church celebrated the Holy Ghost’s descent on the timorous apostles. Then, too, He had come in the form of tongues of fire. A marine told the two civilians that they should return to the safe part of the city. In an hour or so, the troops would have tightened their noose around the prison and might even have freed it.

So off they set, turned a corner, then another, and were in the line of fire. Confused, they bolted in different directions and, moments later, Nicola found himself confronted by four smudge-faced creatures with the white eyes of maddened horses.

‘Aha!’ cried a loose-toothed, hairless one and grappled him to his bony chest. Rubbing a blackened, stubby cheek to his cheek, he cried, ‘Don Nicola, isn’t it? A ghost? Or am I dead myself?’

He, he cried, was Don Mauro, alias Monsieur Maur! Remember? At Monsieur Lammenais’ funeral? He was fighting with the Garibaldini who had come to help the Commune. Why not? At his age it would be a bonus to die fighting. Think of it! He had expected to die decades ago of tuberculosis and instead here he was. Better a bullet than
consumption
! Eh? Here, take a gun. What are you doing here? What a turn-up! We’re all Italians here!

He waved at three other men, veterans all, he said, of 1848! ‘Hunker down behind this. So you threw off your cassock in the end, did you? Ha!’ cried Don Mauro, ‘they’re getting brazen!’ And turning away he
began energetically shooting through a small gap at what, Nicola feared, must be the same troops as he and Blount had just left. ‘Keep
down
,’ scolded Mauro. ‘You’re not a combatant, I can see. What are you doing here?’

Nicola said he was seeking news of Archbishop Darboy. Was he dead? Yes, said Mauro. ‘They shot him last Wednesday inside the prison. R.I.P. The Vatican won’t be sorry, whatever they pretend.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Keep down, will you! Down!’

Bullets skidded off the top of the barricade and one of the others said, ‘We’ll have to leave here. Fall back to the
Mairie.’

‘The Army says you’re surrounded.’

Don Mauro rose and peered over the top, then waved at an empty street. ‘They’ve gone!’

‘Tell me about Darboy.’

‘He was shot by a firing squad. In revenge. Six National Guardsmen had been put up against a wall by the regular army, so their mates killed six hostages. They thought it would make more of an impression if they took Darboy.’

‘What did you mean about the Vatican?’ Nicola felt sick with foreboding.

Don Mauro winked. ‘General Cluseret had ordered Darboy’s release and he was within a whisker of being freed. Instead, someone told Cluseret’s colleagues what was afoot and they arrested
him.
What you must know is that
that
someone was an agent of Monsignor Chigi’s. And if you want to know how
I
know, I know the man. He’s an old Garibaldino who turned his coat. We rumbled him years back but tolerate him lest they replace him by someone more efficient. When we’re killed he’ll be laughing – or maybe he’ll miss us? Maybe he’ll put flowers on our graves?’

The lull continued. One of the Garibaldini was sucking at a loaf of bread and Nicola wondered whether he dare move on. He had, however, lost all sense of direction. Sheepishly, he consulted Don Mauro, explaining that, apart from his interest in Archbishop Darboy, he belonged to neither side. Don Mauro was amused. ‘Better not tell them!’ he said, with a jerk of his chin towards his companions, who were using the respite to make themselves comfortable. One was reloading his gun while another relieved himself in a corner.

‘It’s Judgment Day on earth!’ said the one with the bread and wrapped it in a blue check cloth. Putting it away, he squinted along the barrel of
his gun. The moment absorbed them and Nicola thought, They’ve found eternity in the here and now. Just then, the one who had reloaded his gun climbed up to survey the street, stiffened, then flopped limply across the top of the barricade.

‘
Merde
!’ Don Mauro swivelled to point his gun the other way.

The shot had come from behind. The marines had them hemmed in.

‘This gentleman is a bishop. I give you my word.’

It was the small hours. Four? Five? Nicola’s watch had stopped. They were in La Roquette prison and Blount was arguing with a tight-lipped staff colonel. In the sky, a milky daylight was mixing with the incendiary blush. Dawn then? Earlier there had been arguments with lesser officers and, in between, hours of just sitting, first in an army outpost, then here in the prison registry which looked as though it had been vacated in a great hurry. Two gold-braided uniforms and a red scarf hung on a peg.

Blount explained again that Nicola had come to Paris in lay clothes and without papers for fear of falling into the hands of the
fédérés
. ‘
I
have papers,’ he offered, but was waved away. The colonel knew who he was, having seen him, it turned out, on a platform representing the Lord Mayor of London’s Relief Fund. And
he
had not been caught with a gun in his hands and powder on his face firing on our men. ‘But…’ began Blount and was interrupted.

The colonel, lean as a whippet and, under his steel demeanour, perhaps as tremulous, held up an arresting hand. ‘Your countrymen give asylum to all and sundry. It is one of your quirks. Any so-called “political” murderer who reaches your shores receives it. Therefore, Mr Blount, we do not easily let them out of our hands and into yours. This story has neither head nor tail. Bishop of Trebizond, you say! An Italian! Trebizond, when I was in school …’

‘It’s a diocese,’ said Nicola numbly, ‘
in partibus
infidelium
.’

‘
Infedelium
? I’d say that was where you were apprehended! And you say the other desperado who was shooting at my men is a priest too? I don’t recognise such priests. We have heard horrors about what was done to real priests, including Archbishop Darboy, whom you claim you hoped to save. Sizeable bits of their brains are stuck to the wall out on the parapet walk. I have just seen them and they’re one of the reasons why I am shooting all assassins.’

Did he mean, asked Blount, he was sending suspects for trial?

No sir, said the colonel. He did not mean that. He showed Blount a
proclamation. It was the last one put out by the retreating Reds. ‘I’ll read it to you: “Order: destroy all houses from whose windows shots have been fired on the National Guard and shoot all inhabitants unless they themselves … execute the perpetrators of such crimes. 24 May at 9 p.m. The Committee for War.” That’s the sort of war we’re fighting. So, no trial. However, though I shoot defrocked priests, I don’t shoot real ones. And though I do not doubt your word, you must permit me to doubt you perspicacity. Can you prove that this gentleman is what you say?’

Blount asked whether the Abbé Amodru, one of the released
prisoners
, was still in the building. Very likely, said the colonel. Fighting was still going on and few prisoners had left.

‘He’ll speak for him. They met in Versailles.’

The colonel said he would have the abbé called and would himself be back shortly. He left and Blount picked a cassock from a pile left, presumably, by the priests who had worn lay clothes to escape. Put it on, he begged Nicola. Encouragingly, he shook it out as a valet might have done, or a tailor’s assistant. ‘Without it, Amodru mightn’t know you. Besides, it will have a good effect on the colonel. He’s ready to crack. I can tell. All that logical talk through clenched teeth is a form of frenzy. This conflict is doing odd things to people. I had an uncle who used to tell me about living through the Sepoy Mutiny in India and how people became quietly unhinged – looked perfectly all right, then suddenly ran amok. Useful to have uncles like that. Does it fit?’

Nicola was apprehending things as though through a slatted blind. ‘Cracking’? Perhaps that was what it meant? Cracks in one’s inner landscape! Did
what
fit? Ah, the cassock. It was a Jesuit one. Wondering whether its owner was now dead, he ran his hands over the matted and faintly sticky cloth. It felt like skin.

The Abbé Amodru came in. He was horrified that Monsignor Santi should be doubted and far more so by what had happened to Darboy and the Jesuits. Yes, three had been shot with Monseigneur, and their Superior, Father Olivaint, had been with the group taken to the rue Haxo. ‘The warders are spilling secrets in the hope that we’ll speak up for them. Turncoats of the worst sort! Yesterday, several changed sides more than once.’ While the abbé talked there was a rattle of gunfire nearby. Rrrrrrr! He crossed himself. Another firing squad. He began to speak of Monseigneur’s death, which had sounded just like that. ‘We were all kneeling in our cells …’ There was another sharp explosion.

‘That’s the
coup
de
grâce
. I’m afraid,’ Blount told Nicola, ‘that those were your companions in arms.’

‘Three old Italians,’ confirmed the abbé. ‘I passed them on my way here.’

The colonel returned and took in the scene. Well, did the abbé vouch for His Lordship? His use of the title showed that he was now ready to be convinced. The abbé began to praise Monsignor Santi’s devotion to the cause of Monseigneur Darboy.

‘You’ve shot them!’ Nicola’s laggardly mind had just caught up. ‘You shot Don Mauro!’

‘… by no means defrocked,’ the abbé was assuring.

‘I am now!’ Nicola wrenched off the cassock – it was choking and clinging to him like a dead man’s skin. ‘I don’t want its protection. It’s Judas cloth! Shoot me! Shoot
me
now as well!’

But the Colonel, embarrassed by such a failure of decorum in a senior officer of our spiritual army, had faded from the room.

Chance reveals latent patterns. Nicola Santi’s name has come up in connection with an inglorious little incident proving that the Church is secretly buying back bits of its lost kingdom. Since it may not do this legally, it uses laymen to hold the property in trust – at the risk that they may default. One who now has is Pietro Gatti, Duke Cesarini’s adoptive heir. On the duke’s death last year, Gatti nominally inherited a lot of such property which he is brazenly claiming as his own. State officials are amused, not to say cockahoop, since this must discourage fresh manoeuvres of the sort. They hint privately that, as Gatti is whispered to be the bastard of the Pope’s bastard – Santi – he is conforming to old usage.
Plus
ça
change
…! The Curia, to be sure, is without remedy and, sooner or later, must learn to do without the temporal.

Oddly, Santi said exactly this to me when explaining why he had flung his cassock – as they say – to the nettles. ‘The Commune,’ he claimed, ‘brought home to people the materialism of our spiritual arithmetic, which is why Darboy asked to be exchanged for Blanqui. He saw the coercive nature of the argument from martyrdom – not to mention how it begets violence.’

Why then, I asked Santi, did
he
ask to be shot? From shame, was his answer. ‘The Temporal Power corrupts,’ he argued and the staff colonel’s assumption that they belonged to similar corps outraged him as much as he outraged the colonel.

Apparently, he went to pieces then and Amodru had to take him to his cell and give him laudanum. Nobody could leave yet because of the fighting. He went to sleep and when he awoke, hours later, the sound in his ears was the rattle of the firing squad. This time it kept pausing and restarting and was punctuated by the shots which he knew now to be
coups
de
grâce.
He was petrified. It sounded as though many hundreds of men were being shot. Wondering whether he was hallucinating, he stumbled from the cell and went looking for his two companions. The building baffled him. It seemed like a maze, though he realised later that its west wing, which was where he was, consisted of a double row of cells with a courtyard on one side and a double parapet-walk on the other. It was out there that he came on a great pile of freshly killed bodies smelling of faeces and urine. A fresh rattle of gunfire made him bolt back in and up a spiral staircase which brought him within earshot of Blount and Amodru, who were in what had been Darboy’s cell. They had found words pencilled on the Judas hole in the form of a cross. These were
robor
vitae
solus
mentis
which, said the abbé, if you read the cross as a word, spelled ‘the cross is the strength of life and the salvation of the soul’.

Just then the gun-rattle took up again and Santi began shrieking. ‘Don’t start a new legend!’ Alarmed lest he draw attention to himself again, they firmly frogmarched him out and into a carriage for which they had been waiting, and drove west across a Paris now entirely in the hands of the Army. Fighting was over but the ‘expiation’ was in full swing and the papers next day would describe the Seine as streaked with blood.

He learned later that what he had heard was the start of a great massacre of Communards. Nineteen hundred were shot in two days in La Roquette prison, and these were only a fraction of those killed in Paris that week, whose number some put at twenty thousand and some at forty thousand. The cross was no salvation at all and in many minds ‘Bloody Week’, as it came to be called, made it impossible to go on believing in the redemptive grace of Passion Week.