The Eloquence of Blood (31 page)

“Mademoiselle Brion told me that this necklace was missing when you undressed Mademoiselle Martine for her coffin.”

“Yes. Mademoiselle Brion was running everywhere, looking for it. I didn't see how a trinket could matter when my mistress was lying there dead. Well, as I was telling you, when Tito came to the Mynette house as a child and saw Martine's necklace, he grew very angry. He said it was his and tried to snatch it from her neck! Mademoiselle Anne beat him for it and almost sent him back to the foundling home. But she gave him another chance and he turned out to be a good worker, so she kept him. And finally the little liar stopped saying such foolish things.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“No.”

“Paul Saglio described him as middling tall, dark haired, and well fleshed. Is that right?”

She shrugged. “I suppose so. Yes, that's—”

She broke off as the liquid-eyed waiter Charles had met when he was there with La Reynie burst into the kitchen. “Madonna says chicken pies,” he yelled at the cook. “She says fruit pies! Cakes and cream, she says, maybe that will quiet them!” He gasped as his eyes fell on Charles and Damiot. “You! No! Go, go,” he hissed, waving his arms at them. “If the
signores
in the café find you, they will kill you for murdering everyone! Go!”

Beyond the door, a surge of argument rose and chairs scraped across the floor. The counter woman screeched furious reprimands. Then, “Luigi what are you doing? Get out here!” Her voice was coming toward the kitchen. Casting dignity to the winds, Charles and Damiot ran for the courtyard and their horses.

“What a pleasant rest,” Damiot said darkly, as they rode along the lane toward the Fossés St. Germain. “I hope we can get back to the college without more of that.”

“We're not going back yet; we're going to the Foundling Hospital. Where is it?”

“We're going home.”

“You go home. Where's the Foundling Hospital?”

“I cannot go back to the college without you; the rector will have my head.”

“Then take us the quickest way to the Foundling Hospital.”

“No. I am your superior. Going there is pointless. This Tito was there years ago; who will remember him? And what good would it do, if they did?”

“The rector is
your
superior, and he ordered me to find these killers.”

Damiot breathed ominously and silently through pinched nostrils. “There are two Foundling Hospitals. Do you want infants or older children?”

“Older, I think.”

“Then we go across Paris.
All
the way across Paris. Out the rue St. Antoine to the
faubourg
. Where I devoutly hope the populace is not starting its year arguing about how much better the world would be without Jesuits.”

In a loud silence, they rode across the river and turned east. In spite of the cold, holidaymakers strolled along the rue St. Antoine in their best clothes. The
bourgeoises
wore sober black and gray and brown, but their inferiors were bright against the snow in reds and yellows and greens rarely seen on workdays. Fastrolling carriages flashed by. Street peddlers bellowed the virtues of their hot coffee, chocolate, small pies and cakes, and smiled under a rain of small coins. Charles wanted to buy something to eat, but Damiot curtly refused and Charles decided not to argue. Most people ignored them, though as they rode past a snowball fight, a few angrily flung snowballs came their way; harmlessly, however, since the throwers' holiday drinking was influencing their aim.

Just past St. Catherine's well, at the Jesuit church of St. Louis, Charles put out a warning hand to Damiot and drew Flamme to a sudden halt. The beggar Marin, hatless but wearing his green almsgiving coat, already torn and dirty, was sitting on the church steps and holding out an insistent hand to passersby.

“Give alms, for love of the
Sacre Coeur
! Give alms for the Sacred Heart, have luck all year,” he chanted, scowling blackly at anyone who ignored him. “Refuse, you'll have a year of tears! Give alms for love of the
Sacre Coeur
.”

Charles saw that tears were running down Marin's face. The people who dropped coins into his hand kept a tight eye on his massive walking stick, careful not to come too close. His long, tangled white hair and beard made him look like a prophet, and he seemed not only at the end of his patience, but nearly as distraught as when Charles and Mme LeClerc had seen him following the mules on the rue St. Jacques.

“Blessed Sacred Heart,” he mourned, his voice rising in a wailing lament. “God and all the saints forgive me, blessed Claire, forgive me . . .” He began to beat his chest. “Sacred Heart, see my tears—” The words trailed off into keening and he rocked himself from side to side.

Charles got down from his horse. Leading Flamme, he went as close to Marin as he dared. “Marin, softly, hush, it's all right. God forgives you.” He put a hand gently on the beggar's shoulder. “Claire forgives you, the Sacred Heart forgives you.”

The old man's eyes flew open and he pulled away. His tears stopped and he stared wordlessly up at Charles, his eyes full of fear.

“What is it, Marin? You know I won't hurt you.” Marin's eyes darted from Charles to the street. “Where is Jean, Marin? Is he here to take care of you?” There was no answer. Charles looked in vain for the beggar's keeper and then took money from the purse the rector had given him and put coins into Marin's gnarled hand. “For your supper and Jean's, too. Come now, get up, you can't stay here. You may not remember Christmas Eve, but if the Professed House rector sees you here, he'll surely remember and give you to the archers.”

Charles was pulling Marin to his feet when the old man froze, staring past him. Then the beggar lurched upright, ducked away from Charles, and fled. Turning to see what had frightened him, Charles saw Lieutenant-Général La Reynie, imposing in a black-brown cloak and a wide beaver hat with a white plume, coming toward him. Behind him marched a solid phalanx of a dozen or more men in thick brown coats and breeches, with pistols in their belts.

Père Damiot, his back to the approaching police, said impatiently, “If we have to go to the Foundling House, let's go and get it over.” Even the stolid Boeuf was shaking his reins, wanting to be gone.

Charles raised his eyebrows. “Turn around,
mon père
,” he said quietly, “and you'll see why we can't leave just yet.”

Damiot turned. “Oh, dear.” He shifted miserably in his saddle.

“
Mon lieutenant-général
, a good New Year to you,” Charles said courteously, as though they were in a
salon
and there were not a small army at La Reynie's back.

“And to you, Maître du Luc.” La Reynie looked at Damiot.

“Monsieur La Reynie, may I present Père Thomas Damiot?”

La Reynie bowed slightly and Damiot acknowledged him.

“Damiot?” La Reynie studied the priest's face. “Your father is head of the Six Corps. A merchant goldsmith, I believe.”

Damiot nodded. “I see that you know everything about the city you keep, Monsieur La Reynie.”

La Reynie looked at Charles. “Unhappily, not everything.” He said something to the officer standing just behind him and then to Charles, “A small word,
maître
.”

Warning Damiot with a look to stay where he was, Charles led Flamme after La Reynie, a little way along the street and out of earshot of the other police.

“What has happened, Monsieur La Reynie?” he said, when the
lieutenant-général
stopped. “I doubt this is how you normally spend your New Year's Day.”

“You doubt correctly. My spies told me last evening, and again this morning, that trouble is likely here at St. Louis. At your college and your novice house, too. I have put armed men at each place, nearly all the daytime men I have. At dark, the night patrol will replace them.” La Reynie's head whipped around as shouts and loud laughter erupted from across the street. He watched a gesticulating knot of men in knee-length mantles, their broad hats askew as they argued. “Drunks.” La Reynie sighed. “But it's drunks who generally start the trouble. Which they'll go on doing, until someone is charged with these murders.” His gaze swept the length of the street. “Until someone confesses,” he said flatly, refusing to meet Charles's eyes.

Charles's stomach turned over. La Reynie was talking about Gilles Brion. The Châtelet was notorious for its ways of making people “confess.”

“I still have not found Monsieur Bizeul's friend Cantel. I did find three more investors in the smuggling scheme,” La Reynie went on. “Two proved beyond doubt that they were elsewhere during the time when Brion must have been killed.” La Reynie smiled sourly. “The third, on the other hand, has no proof. But he doesn't need any. He's seventy and frail, with only one foot. He lost the other forty years ago as one of Condé's men in the Fronde revolution.” He stopped to watch his own men walking up and down the street in pairs, missing nothing, staying always within earshot of their fellows. “I can keep things quiet a while longer with shows of force in the street. And arrests, too, if it comes to it, though arrests may only stir the fires.” He shook his head. “But the weather is growing colder, there's more and more sickness about, especially among the workers in the St. Victor quartier, prices are rising again—and we haven't even begun the worst of the winter! People are ready to take their fears out on whatever comes to hand.”

“And Jesuits have come to hand.”

The
lieutenant-général
's eyes held Charles's. “And therefore, I have to produce the Mynette girl's killer and Henri Brion's. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Charles said, colder inside than out, “that you have Gilles Brion in the Châtelet and will use him if you must.”

La Reynie twitched his cloak angrily aside, as though his smoldering anger were heating him. “I will not ‘use' him! I have never, to my knowledge, executed the wrong man and I never want to. But Brion seems more than likely as his father's killer, if not the girl's. And he had plenty of reason for her murder, as you well know.” La Reynie sighed heavily. “There are other reasons for haste. On the thirtieth day of this month, the king is coming to a reception and dinner with the city worthies at the Hôtel de Ville. Do you know how rarely the king comes to Paris? He hates Paris. But you wouldn't know that, you're a foreigner. I cannot let him come into a city on the edge of riots.” In Paris, a foreigner was anyone not from Paris.

“I may be a foreigner from darkest Languedoc,” Charles said dryly, “but I can count. We have nearly all of January to find the killer.”

“No. The king already knows of the unrest here. Have you forgotten that his confessor, Père La Chaise, is one of your own? I have been told that the king wants this affair concluded, and quickly. He is furious that his own confessor's order is being accused of murdering for gain. And furious at the thought of riots. I tell you, he hates unrest in Paris more than the pope hates the devil!” The
lieutenant-général
's head whipped around again, as a roar of laughter rose by St. Catherine's well. Someone's hat, blown off in a gust of east wind, was rolling away down the street, chased by three skinny dogs.

La Reynie rubbed his tired face and turned back to Charles. “Do you have anything for me? Anything at all?”

With a pang of sympathy for the man's obvious exhaustion, Charles gave up arguing.

“Nothing you will like. Paul Saglio, the servant Martine Mynette dismissed for being too forward, is innocent. We talked to him and his fellow servants in Vaugirard this morning, and it seems certain that he was there when she was killed. But I learned more about the Mynettes' ex-gardener, Tito La Rue, the one Renée told us about, who was turned out in November for trying to get into Martine's bedchamber. It seems that, from a child, he claimed Martine's missing necklace as his own—God knows why. It seems unlikely that he'd come back and kill her over such a tiny thing. And I cannot imagine any reason for him to kill the notary. But since the necklace
is
missing, he ought to be questioned.”

“Find him. Did Renée tell you where he went when he left the Mynette house?”

“No. All I know is his name and that he's in his midtwenties, middling tall and well fleshed, and that his hair is dark. And that he started life as a foundling.”

La Reynie's face fell. “That's all?”

Charles nodded toward the east. “I'm going now to the Foundling Hospital to ask about him.”

“The man was a foundling? And what—twenty years ago? Do you know how many thousands of children they care for? And their houses have been reformed and moved several times, so who knows what records they have?” The
lieutenant-général
looked ready to weep. “Oh, well, report to me what you find.” He turned away, his face eloquent with exactly how much help he expected to come out of Charles's inquiries. Charles remounted and signaled to Damiot, and they rode toward the Faubourg St. Antoine.

“Old Marin looked more frightened than I've ever seen him,” Damiot said, as they passed the stately redbrick houses of the Place Royale. “What was the matter?”

“You know Marin?”

“I've seen him often enough in the streets.”

“I don't know why he was so afraid. Maybe he's getting crazier.”

“I feel sorry for beggars, but Paris has too many. How can ordinary people go about their business?”

“Rich people, you mean. Why shouldn't they share what they have with God's poor?”