“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- General 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.
Pere 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 pere,” 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-general, 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, Maitre du Luc.” La Reynie looked at Damiot.
“Monsieur La Reynie, may I present Pere 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, maitre.”
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-general 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 Chatelet 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 Conde’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-general’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 Chatelet 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 Hotel 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, Pere 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-general’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
