Quicksilver (72 page)

“Of course! I told you he sold coffee, didn’t I?”

“A Turk named—Christopher?”

“Don’t play the clown, Jacques—remember that I know you.”

“But—?”

St.-George rolled his eyes, and snapped, “All of the Turks who sell coffee in the streets are actually Armenians dressed up as Turks!”

“I’m sorry, St.-George, I didn’t know.”

“I should not be so harsh,” St.-George admitted. “When you left Paris, coffee was not fashionable yet—not until the Turks fled from Vienna, and left mountains of it behind.”

“It’s been fashionable in England since I was a boy.”

“If it is in England, it is not
fashionable,
but a
curiosity,
” St.-George said through clenched teeth.

Onwards they searched, St.-George wending like a ferret through the crowd, passing round, e.g., furniture-sellers carrying fantastic complexes of stools and chairs all roped together on their backs, milk-men with pots on their heads,
d’oublies
carrying unlit lanterns, and bent under enormous dripping barrels of shit; knife-grinders trundling their wheels. Jack had to put the crutch to much rude use, and considered taking out the sword. Eliza had been right—Paris
was
retail—funny she’d known this without ever having set foot in the city, while Jack, who’d lived here, on and off, for years…

Best to keep his mind on St.-George. Only the rat-pole prevented Jack from losing him. Though it helped that people were always running out of shops, or shouting from windows, trying to engage his services. The only people who could afford to keep fixed shops were members of a few princely trades, viz. makers of dresses, hats, and wigs. But St.-George treated all men alike, asking them a series of penetrating questions and then firmly sending them home. “Even noblemen and savants are as peasants in their understanding of rats,” St.-George said incredulously. “How can I be of service to them when their thinking is so pre-theoretical?”

“Well, as a start, you could get rid of their rats…”

“One does not
get rid of
rats! You are no better than these people!”

“Sorry, St.-George. I—”

“Does anyone ever
get rid of
Vagabonds?”

“Individual ones, certainly. But—”

“Individual to
you
—but to a Gentleman, all the same, like rats,
n’est-ce pas
? One must live with rats.”

“Except for the ones dangling from your pole—?”

“It is like the exemplary hanging. The heads on the spikes before the city-gates.”

“To scare
les autres
?”

“Just so, Jacques. These were, to rats, as you, my friend, are to Vagabonds.”

“You are too kind—really, you flatter me, St.-George.”

“These were the cleverest—the ones who would find the smallest of holes, who would explore the drain-pipes, who would say to the common rats: ‘gnaw through this grate,
mes amis
—it will
shorten your teeth to be sure—but once through, such things you will feast on!’ These were the savants, the Magellans—”

“And they’re dead.”

“They displeased me too many times, these did. Many others, I allow to live—to breed, even!”

“No!”

“In certain cellars—unbeknownst to the apothecaries and par-fumiers who live above—I have rat seraglios where my favorites are allowed to procreate. Some lines I have bred for a hundred generations. As a breeder of canines creates dogs fierce against strangers, but obedient to the master—”

“You create rats that obey St.-George.”

“Pourquoi non?”

“But how can you be so certain that the rats are not breeding
you
?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your father was
mort-aux-rats,
no?”

“And his father before him. Killed in plagues, may God have mercy on their souls.”

“So you believe. But perhaps the rats killed them.”

“You anger me. But your theory is not without promise—”

“Perhaps you, St.-George, are the result of a breeding program—you have been allowed to live, and flourish, and have children of your own, because you have a theory that is congenial to the rats.”

“Still, I kill very many.”

“But those are the stupid ones—without introspection.”

“I understand, Jacques. For you, I would serve as
mort-aux-rats
and would do it for free. But these—” he made a flicking gesture at a man in an excellent wig who was trying to call him over to a shop. The man looked crestfallen—temporarily. But then St.-George softened, and moved in the direction of a narrow doorway—more hatch than door—set into the wall of this wig-maker’s shop, next to his open shop-window. This suddenly burst open, and a round-bodied five-foot-tall man with a vigorous moustache and curly-toed slippers emerged from a stairway no wider than he was, preceded by a smoking and steaming apparatus of hammered copper that was strapped to his body.

When Christopher (for it was none other) stood in the sun, which he always tried to do, the golden light gleamed off the copper and hung in the steam and glittered off his golden fez-tassel and shone in his embroidered slippers and brass buttons and made him very magnificent, a walking mosque. He switched
among French, Spanish, and English in mid-sentence, and he claimed to know all about Jack Shaftoe (whom he addressed as
l’Emmerdeur
), and tried to give him coffee for free. He had just refilled his tanks upstairs, he explained, and was heavy burdened. St.-George had warned that Christopher would make this offer “because he will want to calculate how much money you are carrying,” and together they had rehearsed a few scenarios of how the coffee-price negotiation might play out. The plan was that Jack would run their side of the dealings, and that St.-George would hover and, at just the right moment, divulge that Jack was looking for a place to stay. Jack had never said as much to St.-George, but then it was not necessary; this was why one approached St.-George upon one’s arrival in the Marais. His work took him into every building—especially to the parts of buildings where people like Jack were apt to stay.

To accept coffee for free was to demean oneself; to overpay was to publicly shame Christopher, by implying that he was the sort of man who cared about something as low and dirty as money; to merely agree on a fair price was to proclaim oneself a simpleton, and accuse Christopher of the same. Arduous haggling, however, laid bare the soul and made the participants blood-brothers. In any event the matter was settled—to the relief of the wig-maker, who stood wringing his hands as this one-legged Vagabond, fat pseudo-Turk, and rat-catcher shouted at each other directly in front of his shop, scaring away business. Meanwhile St.-George was striking a deal of his own with the wig-maker. Jack was too busy to eavesdrop, but he gathered that St.-George was using his influence to get Jack a room, or at least a corner, upstairs.

Just so: after a ceremonial cup of coffee in the street, Jack bid adieu to St.-George (who had immediate responsibilities in the cellar) and to Christopher (who had coffee to vend), stepped through the tiny door, and began to ascend stairs—past the wig-maker’s shop on the ground level, and then, on the first story, his dwelling—the fine parts of it anyway, such as parlour and dining-room. Then a story for the family bedchambers. Then a story where his servants had their quarters. Then one he had rented out to a tradesman of lesser rank. As the storys mounted, the quality plunged. In the bottom levels the walls and steps alike were solid stone, but this gave way to wooden steps and plaster walls. As Jack continued to climb, the plaster developed cracks, then began to bulge and flake off the lath. At the same time, the stair-steps became creaky, and began to flex beneath his weight. In the top
story there was no plaster on the walls at all, just birds’ nests of straw and wattle spanning gaps among timbers. Here, in one large room interrupted by a few struts to shore up the roof, lived Christopher’s family: countless Armenians sleeping and sitting on squarish bales of coffee-beans. A ladder in the corner gave access to the roof, whereupon a sort of lean-to shack, called by the grand name of
entresol
, had been improvised. A sailor-hammock hung corner-to-corner. Several bricks were shoved together to form a pad where a fire could be lit. On the tile roof downhill of the entresol, a tissue of brown streakage gave a hint as to where previous occupants had done their shitting and pissing.

Jack vaulted into the hammock and discovered that previous tenants had thoughtfully punched various peep-holes through the adjoining walls. It would be a drafty hovel in winter, but Jack liked it: he had clear views, and open escape-routes, across roof-tops in several directions. The building across the street had a garret, no farther away from Jack’s entresol than one room in a house was from another, but separated from him by a crevasse sixty or seventy feet deep. This was more typical of the sort of place Jack would expect to dwell (though he could almost hear St.-George telling him that, now that he was a man of wealth, he must set his sights higher). So he could hear the conversations, and smell the food and the bodies, of the people across the way. But, lying there in his hammock, he got to watch them as if their life were a play, and he in the audience. It appeared to be the usual sort of high-altitude bolt-hole for prostitutes on the run from pimps, runaway servants, women pregnant out of wedlock, and youthful peasants who’d walked to Paris expecting to find something.

Jack tried to nap, but it was the middle of the afternoon and he could not sleep with Paris happening all around him. So he set out across the roof-tops, memorizing the turns he’d take, the leaps he’d make, the crevices he’d hide in, the places he’d stand and fight, if the Lieutenant of Police ever came for him. This led to his tromping over numerous roof-tops, setting off great commotions and panics among many garret-dwellers who lived in fear of raids. Mostly he had the roof-tops to himself. There were a few Vagabondish-looking children moving in packs, and a large number of roof-rats. On almost every block there were tattered ropes, or frail tree-branches, bridging gaps over streets, not strong enough for humans, but enthusiastically used by rats. In other places the ropes lay coiled neatly on roofs, the sticks rested in rain-gutters. Jack reckoned that they must have been put up by St.-George, who
used them to channel and control the migrations of rats, as a general might tear down bridges in one part of a disputed territory while improvising new ones elsewhere.

Eventually Jack descended to street-level, and found that he’d arrived in a better part of town, near the river. He headed, without thinking about it, toward his old playground, the Pont-Neuf. The street was a wiser place for him to be—persons who clambered about on roof-tops were not well thought of—but it was dark, and confined between the stone walls of the buildings. Even the view down the street was closed off by balconies jutting out more than halfway across it from either side. The houses all had great arched portals closed off by ironbound fortress-doors. Sometimes a servant would have one open just at the moment Jack happened by. He’d slow down and look through and get a glimpse down a cool shaded passageway into a courtyard lit with sun, half filled in by landslides of flowers, watered by gurgling fountains. Then the door would be shut. Paris to Jack and most others, then, was a network of deep trenches with vertical walls, and a few drafty battlements atop those walls—otherwise, the world’s largest collection of closed and locked doors.

He walked by a statue of King Looie as Roman general in stylish Classical armor with exposed navel. On one side of the pedestal, Winged Victory was handing out loaves to the poor, and on the other, an angel with a flaming sword, and a shield decorated with a trinity of fleur-de-lis, backed up by a cross-swinging, chalice-and-wafer-brandishing Holy Virgin, was assaulting and crushing diverse semi-reptilian demons who were toppling backwards onto a mess of books labelled (though Jack could not read, he knew this) with such names as M. Luther, J. Wycliffe, John Hus, John Calvin.

The sky was opening. Sensing he was near the Seine, Jack lunged forward and finally reached the Pont-Neuf. “Pont” was French for an artificial isthmus of stone, spanning a river, with arches beneath to let the water flow through—pylons standing in the flow, dividing it with their sharp blades; atop, a paved street lined with buildings like any other in Paris, so that you wouldn’t know you were crossing over a river unless a Parisian told you so. But in this one respect the Pont-Neuf was different: it had no buildings, just hundreds of carved heads of pagan gods and goddesses, and so you could
see
from there. Jack went and did some seeing. Many others had the same idea. Upstream, late-afternoon sunlight set the backs of the buildings on the Pont au Change to glowing; a steady rain of shit flew out of the windows, and was
swallowed by the Seine. The river’s crisp stone banks were occluded by a permanent jam of small boats and barges. Newly arriving ones attracted surging riots of men hoping to be hired as porters. Some boats carried blocks of stone that had been cut to shape by freemasons working out in the open, somewhere upstream; these boats pulled up along special quays equipped with cranes powered by pairs of large stepped wheels in which men climbed forever without ascending, turning a gear-train that reeled in a cable that passed over a pulley at the end of a tree-sized arm, hoisting the blocks up out of the boats. The entire crane—wheels, men, and all—could be rotated around and the block dropped into a heavy cart.

Elsewhere, the same amount of labor might’ve made a keg of butter or a week’s worth of firewood; here it was spent on raising a block several inches, so that it could be carted into the city and raised by other workers, higher and higher, so that Parisians could have rooms higher than they were wide, and windows taller than the trees they looked out at. Paris was a city of stone, the color of bone, beautiful and hard—you could dash yourself against it and never leave a mark. It was built, so far as Jack could tell, on the principle that there was nothing you couldn’t accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years. Off to the right, as he looked upstream, was the Île de la Cité, crowded and looming with important stuff: the twin, square towers of Notre Dame, and the twin, round towers of the Conciergerie, holding out prospects of salvation and damnation like a mountebank telling him to pick a card, any card. The Palais de Justice was there, too, a white stone monster decorated with eagles, ready to pounce.